Davies' Rising Road

Here at the faculty lounge we periodically talk about recent books; one of my new year's resolutions is to be a regular poster about new books.  I thought that I'd get a jump on this with one of my last posts of 2011.  I want to talk a little about Ohio State Law Professor Sharon Davies' Rising Road: A True Story of Love, Race, and Religion in America.    This is about an event spoken about with some frequency in Alabama, but completely forgotten elsewhere -- the August 1921 murder of a Catholic priest in Birmingham by a Methodist minister because the priest had married the minister's daughter to a Puerto Rican man.   Davies uses the trial -- in which Hugo Black defended the minister -- as a vehicle for understanding anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant attitudes of the 1920s.  

Cribbing now from Oxford University Press' webpage about Rising Road:

Sharon Davies's Rising Road resurrects the murder of Father Coyle and the trial of his killer. As Davies reveals with novelistic richness, Stephenson's crime laid bare the most potent bigotries of the age: a hatred not only of blacks, but of Catholics and "foreigners" as well. In one of the case's most unexpected turns, the minister hired future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to lead his defense. Though regarded later in life as a civil rights champion, in 1921 Black was just months away from donning the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret order that financed Stephenson's defense. Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black defended the minister on claims that the Catholics had robbed Ruth away from her true Protestant faith, and that her Puerto Rican husband was actually black. 

Placing the story in social and historical context, Davies brings this heinous crime and its aftermath back to life, in a brilliant and engrossing examination of the wages of prejudice and a trial that shook the nation at the height of Jim Crow. 

This shows yet again how we can use trials to see well beyond the conflict of the trial into ideas and tensions that ripple throughout our nation.  

Comments

[Steven Lubet]

It is an excellent book.

[Alexander Tsesis]

Al and Steve,

Thanks for taking the time to post your reviews.

Alex