On October 20, 1921 a Methodist minister Rev. Edwin R. Stephenson was acquitted of killing Catholic priest Rev. James E. Coyle in Birmingham, Alabama. The rather sensational trial centered upon the idea that the priest committed a heinous social crime by marrying the white daughter of Stephenson to a negro man in the Catholic congregation of Coyle. The interracial marriage was argued by the defense legal team of Stephenson to be such a gross breech of racial propriety that Stephenson was justified in killing the priest. Shortly after crying on the stand, Stephenson exclaimed under Hugo Black’s cross-Hxamination what he said to the priest prior to shooting him: “You have ruined my home! That man is a Negro.” As the lead attorney in the case, Hugo Black, specifically dimmed the lights in the courtroom and reduced the natural lighting in order to parade the Methodist minister’s son-in-law, Pedro Guzman (who was Hispanic) in front of the jury. When Guzman walked into the courtroom, he did not know that moments before his father-in-law had accused him of being a negro. A few days later, Guzman wrote a letter to a Birmingham newspaper defending himself against the accusation, saying he had received haircuts from a barber that does not cut negro hair in Birmingham. Stephenson was found not guilty of killing the priest by the jury in a case predicated upon anti-Catholic and anti-black sentiments. The KKK raised funds for the trial and paid for the legal defense of Stephenson led by Hugo Black.
The abhorrent breach of justice may be what precipitated Republican president Warren Harding’s rhetorical breach of epideictic protocol while in Birmingham a few days later to speak to the segregated audience of over 100,000 people at Woodrow Wilson Park. In a speech that was supposed to be about celebrating the 75th anniversary of Birmingham, the President set down his written remarks to exclaim: “When I suggest the possibility of economic equality between the races, I mean it precisely the same way and to the same extent that I would mean it if I spoke of equality of economic opportunity as between members of the same race… I can say to you people of the South, both white and black, that the time has passed when you are entitled to assume that the problem of races is peculiarly and particularly your problem. It is the problem of democracy everywhere, if we mean the things we say about democracy as the ideal political state. Whether you like it or not, our democracy is a lie unless you stand for that equality.” His extemporaneous remarks attacking the racist predicates of Birmingham life were immediately denounced by Democratic congressional members as a: “a blow to the white civilization of America.” Harding had himself been denounced in Ohio as being a “n-word” during numerous state and national elections. His Ohio father-in-law forbade his daughter from marrying a black man. She failed to follow his expectation. In 2015, the New York Times was pleased to report that based upon genetic testing, Harding was not in fact black.
never had a history of announcing the race and religion of employees, they produced much fanfare in revealing these diverse employees for Black. All of this seemed to be orchestrated to convince the public that Black was far beyond his KKK intellectual roots in Birmingham. Hugo Black explained to the New York Times how the public misunderstood the nature of the KKK in 1967 after being on the Supreme Court for 30 years:
“The Klan in those days was not what it became later. There were a few extremists in it, but most of the people were the cream of Birmingham’s middle-class. It was a fraternal organization, really. It wasn’t anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, or anti-Negro. In fact, it was a Jew, my closest friend, Herman Beck, who asked me to join, and said they needed good people in the Klan. He couldn’t be in it, of course, but he wanted to keep down the few extremists.”
Black’s outrageous lies and rationalizations in 1967 about the misunderstood good character of the KKK is typical of the romanticism and historiography surrounding the Democratic Party’s inceptional role in creating anti-blackness as a uniquely violent institution in the 20th century. Despite the hagiography that continues to venerate Justice Black as a great champion of civil rights, Black’s most important contributions to the Court were: 1) his authorship of the Korematsu majority opinion rationalizing the internment of Japanese Americans and 2) his championing of the anti-religious dogma of a “wall separating church and state.”
In the 1944 Korematsu case, writing for the Supreme Court majority, Justice Black explained that: “all legal restrictions which curtail the civil rights of a single racial group are immediately suspect” and subject to tests of “the most rigid scrutiny,” not all such restrictions are inherently unconstitutional. “Pressing public necessity,” he wrote, “may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can.” Black was able to rationalize one of the most profoundly unjust decisions of the 20th-century Court. It fit perfectly well with the political world as envisioned by the KKK.
His second major contribution was the distortive notion of Jefferson’s wall separating church and state. His 1947 opinion in Everson explained: “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach. New Jersey has not breached it here.” This doctrine was promoted by Black in more than a dozen Supreme Court decisions and remains one of the most popular misconceptions today held fiercely by secular intellectuals as a reactionary tool for screening religious life out of our public sphere. Black posited that the State was continually threatened by an overwhelming violent force of Christian sectarianism and only his interpretation of the separation doctrine could save the ever-vulnerable federal government. This fierce attachment and development over roughly a dozen cases would lead the Supreme Court to try to curtail the metaphor after his death in 1971 by acknowledging that it was inherently hostile to religion. Many intellectual leaders have ignored that conclusion offered by the Court since the 1980s.
The absurd pretense surrounding the jurisprudence of Hugo Black is one of thousands of symptomatic examples wherein the political ideology of the Democratic Party is rewritten to reflect the idea that FDR, Wilson, Black and others were bending the arc of American history toward justice. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is this symptom of epistemic betrayal that lies at the heart of current national frustrations in politics. It is critical to reassess the absurdities of American history in order to understand the truly patriotic goodness that is America.
Dr. Ben Voth is a professor of rhetoric and director of debate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. His most recent book — The Presidential Rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge: The Centennial of the Modern American Presidency — examines racial controversies surrounding the American presidency.
Image: Library of Congress
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