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Hugo Black of Alabama NewSouth Books Three decades after his death, the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black remain both and enigma and controversial. This latest, definitive study of Black’s origins and early influences has been twenty-five years in the making and offers fresh, dramatic insights into the Justice’s character, philosophy, and ethics. Hugo Black came out of hardscrabble Alabama hill country, and he never forgot his origins. He was shaped by the early 20th-century politics of Alabama and Birmingham, where he set up a law practice and began his political career, eventually rising to the U.S. Senate. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt selected him for America’s highest court in 1937, Black’s appointment was widely condemned once it was reported nationally that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. One of the book’s conclusions that is sure to be controversial is that, in the context of Alabama and Birmingham in the early 1920s, Black’s joining of the KKK was politically progressive and personally ethical. This startling assertion is supported by an examination of Black’s choices amid the conflicts raging in Birmingham at that time between industrialists and labor unions. Black, of course, went on to become one of America’s staunchest judicial champions of free speech, civil liberties, and civil rights and, as a result, he was one of the figures most vilified in the South by the KKK and other white supremacists in the 1950s and early ‘60s. For more information on the book and its author, visit http://www.hugoblack.com.
Reviews “A riveting account of the forces that shaped Hugo Black into the most remarkable Supreme Court justice of the twentieth century. He was, as his wife Josephine said, an ‘irresistible force’—and here are the origins and development of his character. His role as a libertarian judge made him anathema in Alabama for decades, but he was always a son of Alabama.” “Suitts makes a persuasive case that Hugo Black’s joining the Ku Klux Klan in 1923 was a progressive step and not an act of bigotry. But the book does far more than that. A vivid account of a young lawyer’s career on the way to the United States Senate, it details the struggle between cultural and economic values, Alabama style, in the first third of the last century.” “Alters our perception of Black’s Alabama origins to focus on the less familiar instances of social activism, including the defense of poor whites and blacks against Birmingham’s entrenched system of wealth and power, struggle to preserve United Mine Workers’ interracial unionism, and battle to save indigent black prisoners from the deadly convict mine system.”
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