About the Author

Born in Winston County (which seceded from Alabama when the state seceded from the Union), STEVE SUITTS is an adjunct at the Institute for Liberal Arts of Emory University, a position he has held for the last twenty years, and has been chief strategist for Better Schools Better Jobs, a Mississippi-based education advocacy project of the New Venture Fund. Suitts began his career as a staff member of the Selma Project. He was founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union, a post he held for five years; the executive director of the Southern Regional Council for eighteen years; and program coordinator, vice president, and senior fellow of the Southern Education Foundation for nearly twenty years. He is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution and was the executive producer and one of the writers of Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a thirteen-hour public radio series that received a Peabody Award for its history of the Southern civil rights movement.

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. -- Anthony Lewis, author of Gideon's Trumpet and former U.S. Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times-- "Source"

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. -- Tony Freyer, University Research Professor of History and Law, The University of Alabama-- "Source"

Biographers and historians have long wondered how it could be that a shrewd Alabama politician, and even a Klansman, could become the nation's preeminent advocate of constitutional rectitude, justice, and equal rights. Until now that question was hard to answer. In this beautifully written story of Black's early life, we learn how the complexities of a man's life defy the common urge to quick judgments and easy stereotypes. This rich and superbly executed work should become a model for unraveling the apparent contradictions in the lives of great figures in our history. -- Paul M. Gaston, Professor Emeritus of Southern and Civil Rights History, University of Virginia-- "Source"

Illuminates the political, economic, class, racial, and family forces that shaped one of the nations' most influential and controversial Supreme Court justices. -- Norman Dorsen, Stokes Professor of Law, New York University, and President ACLU, 1976-1991-- "Source"

In rich detail, and with a wealth of eyewitness testimony, Suitts lets the reader see why Hugo Black was a great man, and how he fell short of perfection. This vivid portrait of Black from his rural roots to his success in the raw industrial city of Birmingham is full of insight and understanding. -- Sheldon Hackney, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Populism to Progressivism in Alabama and The Politics of Presidential Appointment-- "Source"

Loaded with detail on an emerging New South as one man maneuvers through its conflicts of race, populism, prohibition and temperance, and woman's suffrage--at a time of a consolidating system of racial segregation. Birmingham's diversity factors in the handling of Black's role in the Ku Klux Klan where white supremacy was compounded with prejudice against Catholics and Jews. Readers will be fascinated by what amounts to the author's argument with himself about the character of his subject. The book is a refreshing reminder of the richness of the region, the benefits of biography for understanding politics, and the exceptionalism of Alabama in the South. -- Alex Willingham, political scientist, chair of the African American Studies Department at Williams College-- "Source"

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. -- George B. Tindall, Kenan Professor of History Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill-- "Source"