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Also by Steve Suitts:

Hugo Black of Alabama, May 2005
Hardcover

HUGO BLACK OF ALABAMA
By: Steve Suitts

Three decades after his death, the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black remain both an enigma and controversial.

NewSouth Books
May 2005
Featuring: Hugo Black
640 pages
ISBN: 1588381447
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction

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.

Media Buzz

Fresh Air - NPR - September 11, 2005