Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution.

Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution. By Steve Suitts. (Montgomery: NewSouth Books, c. 2005. Pp. 640. $37.50, ISBN 1-58838-144-7.)

Steve Suitts definitively covers not only the chronology of events in Hugo Black's pre-Washington life but also the Alabama forces that shaped what an earlier biographer has described as Hugo Black's complex personality. Suitts digs deeper into the justice's Alabama years than has any previous biographer in order to shed light on Black's basic values and to examine his seeming inconsistencies.

Born in 1886 among the hills of Clay County--soon to be an Alabama Populist stronghold--Black grew up in the two-mule county seat of Ashland as the youngest son of a prosperous merchant of Irish descent. By all odds he should have been heir to his Bourbon Democrat father's conservative legacy (as an Alabama Redeemer, Grover Cleveland supporter, and member of the local courthouse ring). Yet early on the remarkably independent child developed "an emotional detachment" from and "cold indifference" toward his frequently drunk father and looked to others as role models (p. 75).

Black showed an early interest in the law by observing trials at the courthouse in Ashland and soaked in the campaign rhetoric of local Populist leaders. He spent many years immersed word-for-word in "the sweeping principles of Populism" while working as a typesetter for the local Populist newspaper (p. 84). Black probably acquired not only some strong Populist proclivities but also an Irish heritage of resistance to the ruling hierarchy, a teetotaler's pious outlook, a Baptist's interpretive independence, and a small-town Alabamian's code of conduct that emphasized the Golden Rule, the worth of the individual, and the sacred bonds of lifelong friendship. Apparently, he also took away from Clay County the less rigidly racist attitudes of some local whites.

After settling in Birmingham in 1907, Black won several high-profile personal injury cases against well-known corporate attorneys and, in a deliberate career choice, soon positioned himself squarely against corporations in defense of organized labor, injured workers (many of whom were African American miners), and others among the weak, downtrodden, and helpless. Black was appointed police court judge and later was elected solicitor (prosecutor) for Jefferson County. Consistently, on the bench and at the bar, he upheld civil liberties and demanded equal rights for all citizens. He fought against police brutality and the convict-lease system--even defending several black prisoners who had led a riot--and supported prohibition and woman suffrage.

Despite a very liberal early record, Suitts says, Black's later actions as a senator and justice have seemed incongruous and contradictory. He authored the opinion banning school prayers, regardless of having served for twenty years as a Baptist Bible class teacher. He advocated freedom of the press without prior restraint but in Alabama had sought to enjoin newspapers against publishing liquor advertisements. He fought determinedly to expand federal protections of civil rights despite having been a vigorous prosecutor and as a senator often complaining about too many rights for the accused. As a justice, Black was "a steady advocate for equal rights" although he once had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) (p. 20).

One of Suitts's most significant contributions is his superb handling of Black's KKK membership by marshaling enough detailed historical evidence to describe not only the specific activities but also the overall focus of the local klavern in the early 1920s. The Birmingham Klan, says Suitts, brought together "middle-class and working-class" "white men through rituals of race, religion, and nationality, in active support of one another and a fundamentalist, Protestant moral agenda" (pp. 427, 426). The group's primary goal was "to redistribute the control and benefits of racial dominance ... to a wider range of Anglo-Saxon men" (p. 427). During the period, the Birmingham Klan neither murdered a single African American nor committed any other bloody deeds, standing in sharp contrast to the unsavory record of the group's corporate and governmental critics who propped themselves up by maintaining the horrific convict-lease system.

And yet even though Black's basic consistency is now apparent--especially as a white Alabama liberal in the 1920s with some old Populist leanings--Suitts wonders if the ultimate question should be whether Black somehow could have drawn upon his small-town values and traditions, forged among the white people of Clay County, to turn his "friends and neighbors away from the inherent evils" of a racist society driven by "a mostly white male electorate" (p. 547). But this grandiose vision probably could have been realized only in the unlikely event that Hugo Black of Alabama--former prosecutor and Klansman--somehow might have become an independent-minded justice of the Supreme Court who single-mindedly championed civil liberties and equal justice for all.

KARL RODABAUGH

Winston-Salem State University