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

By Steve Suitts

Three decades after his death, the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black continue to be studied and discussed. This definitive study of Black’s origins and early influences has been 25 years in the making and offers fresh insights into the justice’s character, thought processes, and instincts. Black came out of hardscrabble Alabama hill country, and he never forgot his origins. He was further shaped in the early 20th-century politics of Birmingham, where he set up a law practice and began his political career, eventually rising to the U.S. Senate, from which he was selected by FDR for the high court. Black’s nomination was opposed partly on the grounds 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 Birmingham in the early 1920s, Black’s joining of the KKK was a progressive act. This startling assertion is supported by an examination of the conflict that was then raging in Birmingham between the Big Mule industrialists and the blue-collar labor unions. Black of course went on to become a staunch judicial advocate of free speech and civil rights, thus making him one of the figures most vilified by the KKK and other white supremacists in the 1950s and 1960s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781588383976

Steve Suitts

STEVE SUITTS is an adjunct at the Institute for Liberal Arts of Emory University 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; the executive director of the Southern Regional Council; and program coordinator, vice president, and senior fellow of the Southern Education Foundation. He is the author of Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution and Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement. He 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.

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Praise for Hugo Black of Alabama

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

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

Illuminates the political, economic, class, racial and family forces that shaped one of the nations’s most influential and controversial Supreme Court justices.

— NORMAN DORSEN, Stokes Professor of Law, New York University, and President ACLU, 1976–1991

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

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

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

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

NewSouth Books

105 South Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright © 2017, 2005 by Steve Suitts

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Suitts, Steve.

Hugo Black of Alabama : how his roots and early career shaped the great champion of the constitution / Steve Suitts.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-58838-144-6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-60306-447-7 (paperback)

1. Black, Hugo LaFayette, 1886–1971. 2. United States. Supreme Court—Biography. 3. Judges—Alabama—Biography. 4. Judges—United States—Biography. I. Title.

2016959377

Design by Randall Williams

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Breuna Baine. Front cover photograph: U.S. Senate

Historical Office. Back cover photograph of the Clay County

Courthouse in Ashland, Alabama: Allen Tullos.

Author photograph: David Suitts.

TO

CAMILLE AND CHUCK

FOR

MOM, GINNY, DAVID, & PHILLIP

AND IN TRIBUTE TO

PEOPLE OF GOOD WILL EVERYWHERE

WHO LOVE THE SOUTH SO MUCH THEY WANT TO MAKE IT BETTER.

Bred to a harder thing than triumph . . .

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preamble: . . . I am a Southerner . . .

1Til Death Does Us Part

2Hugo-to-Hell

3A Dern Sight More Snakes Than You Can Kill

4Bessemer Blues

5Haughty Warriors

6Home at War

7Ego and the Miniards

8. . . For Better, For Worse . . .

9The Bottom of the Evil

10The Golden Rule of Good Citizenship

11The Humblest Son of the Humblest Citizen

12. . . Not Near Free . . .

Benediction: Friends . . . My Friends

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

While it bears my name as author, this book depended over a long time upon the good will, support, knowledge, and assistance of many people whom I wish to recognize. As a young man, I began studying the life and times of Hugo Black as a research assistant to Charles Morgan, Jr., who started a Black biography in 1970. The biography languished because, as one of Alabama’s great civil rights lawyers, Chuck was too busy helping to bring the U.S. Constitution to the South and, later, to lead a national movement to impeach President Richard M. Nixon.

In the early 1980s, Chuck invited me to become a co-author of the Black biography, but neither of us had adequate time to complete the necessary research, writing, and reflection. Ten years later, because of Chuck’s declining health and his faith in an erstwhile research assistant from Alabama, the biography became mine to write. Anyone who examines this book’s endnotes will see the enormous importance of Chuck’s interviews. What the sources cannot evidence is his boundless intellect, which helped to shape my own knowledge and perspectives. As Chuck said to me once, and I should say to readers, this is not the book he would have written. Everyone also should know that it could not have been written without him.

I do not know the names of countless persons who undoubtedly helped with this book. For one thing, Chuck had a way of enlisting almost everyone he met in any project he undertook. More broadly, books of scholarship depend upon the men and women who quietly operate libraries and archives, one of America’s truly important democratic institutions. To all librarians in the reading rooms, stacks, references desks, back offices, and cubbyholes, I offer my genuine appreciation for the assistance and courtesies shown me during the hundreds of hours I spent in your buildings. Also, I want to recognize the people who took the time to recall Hugo Black and the other people and events in their lives. Many of their names are listed in the book’s references. Most deserve their own biographies.

A large number of other people helped in my research. Some friends may have forgotten by now. While I did not keep a little black book, as did Judge Black, I do remember my friends’ assistance. Cathy Wright and Henry Agee helped with research on specific questions of fact. Mike Mobbs shared his home and ear during several of my research trips to Washington. Jim Looney transported files from Washington to Atlanta. Emily Carsow researched Alabama cases before computers made it as easy as my typing two words into the computer. Neil Bradley also assisted in case research. Tim Pace, Jim Montgomery, Mark Mandell, J. L. Chestnut, Marvin Whiting, John England, and Francis Walter took the time to help track down leads for research and interviews. Tom Gordon, Steve Franklin, and Guin Robinson helped locate photographs.

John Egerton helped in many ways but none more vital than never allowing me to forget the importance of finishing this book. Decades ago, Leslie Dunbar enabled financial support for Chuck Morgan and me to do research. Over the years, Paul Gaston, Raymond Wheeler, Gwen Cherry, Jack Murrah, Mary Frances Derfner, Rick Montague, John A. Griffin, Lottie Shackelford, and Harry Ashmore constituted a Greek chorus of encouragement. I only wish all were here to read the book. Alexis Barrett, Frances Self Drennen, Johnny Greene, Dot Hughley, and Pat Williams spent hours reading my chicken-scratch or listening to my Alabama twang in producing manuscripts and transcripts. All provided useful comments on the work.

I am indebted to Jeff Norrell and David Chalmers for reading parts of earlier manuscripts. Their comments helped me avoid some of my mistakes. My old friends Ralph and Marjorie Knowles have helped over the years with friendly counsel and support. My longtime partner in the work to move societies beyond poverty and racism, Lynn Jones Huntley, read parts of my manuscript and assisted me in thinking deeply about my subject. Larry Yackle is the brave soul who first read all of my early manuscript, produced research materials, and gave me insightful comments on style and substance.

Randall Williams is my friend and editor. He understood and edited this book better than anyone else could. I am also thankful to Suzanne La Rosa, who proves that steel magnolias can grow up in New York. Also very supportive at NewSouth Books were Brian Seidman, Mildred Wakefield, and Lisa Emerson. Others who assisted with important detail work were Janet Keene, Jenelle Mason, Horace Williams, and Joyce Alarcón.

Allen Tullos has accompanied me on this intellectual journey since the start. In early days, late at night, he would find me in the University of Alabama Library basement (where old newspapers were stored) and stay an extra hour to help read. In 1971, he and I spent weeks researching and copying newspapers and public records together in the Clay County courthouse. Over the decades, he has helped with interviews, research, reading parts of the manuscript, and long, thoughtful conversations about Alabama and Black. Peter Buttenwieser is one of my best friends who was invaluable to this book. Over the years, he critiqued chapters, responded to my occasional flood of thoughts, and supported my work as a Yankee who understands and loves the good of the South. As Yeats said, Friends that have been friends indeed.

Finally, I owe a public expression of appreciation to my family in Alabama and in Georgia. The first time I met my wife, Ginny, over thirty years ago, we talked primarily about Hugo Black and Alabama. And, we have continued the conversations over these many years. My sons, David and Phillip, who are certainly city boys, have come to the conclusion that their dad can turn any conversation to Alabama and Hugo Black—and for good reason.

Together these named and unnamed persons have made essential contributions to this book. I truly appreciate each one and hope the book is worthy of their cooperation and support.

STEVE SUITTS

Preamble

‘. . . I am a Southerner . . .’

HOMECOMING—1970

Amid persisting, thunderous applause, the old man’s head protruded slightly above the podium as he smiled mischievously at one moment, innocently at another. His hazel eyes twinkled brightly, as if they retained a deep, devilish secret which he had no intention of divulging, while from a distance his wrinkled, happy face seemed baby-smooth, almost angelic, brightly lit by the banquet lights that shone about his white hair, white shirt, and white, formal dinner jacket. I am delighted to be down here, he murmured with a touch of practiced shyness as the audience’s noises slowly quieted. It’s always delightful for me to come back to Alabama.

At eighty-four, Hugo L. Black—senior member of the United States Supreme Court—stood before an overflowing crowd of lawyers, politicians, judges, friends, and family who had assembled in Birmingham to welcome him home, to celebrate his remarkable public career which began in this city at a time when most of the audience had not been born. It was July 1970, a sultry, intolerant time in Alabama, and ironically the venue was the Alabama Bar Association’s annual convention, a meeting that Black rarely, if ever, attended earlier during his twenty-two years as one of the state’s practicing attorneys. Now Judge Black was making the first publicized appearance in his old home since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the 1954 decision outlawing public school segregation. That case, more than any other single act or event, had propelled America away from government-sanctioned racial discrimination and estranged Black from his homeland.

Black began with a strong, clear voice, trained long before the public use of microphones and honeycombed with an agreeable, distinctively rural accent. The old man had not lived in Alabama for more than forty years, but he sounded more Southern than most of his audience who still lived in the heart of Dixie. I recall very vividly, he said, "a few years ago, our state legislature, that I love very much, passed a resolution suggesting that they would probably purchase a cemetery lot for me in some other state." He paused to let the humor take effect, but ripples of nervous, embarrassed laughter were not loud enough to muffle Dorothy Thomas, wife of a Mobile federal district court judge who sat at a table in front of the dais within earshot of the speaker and across from Black’s family.

That’s right, Hugo, Mrs. Thomas hissed. "That’s where you need to be, Hugo. In a cemetery lot."

Needless to say, Black continued, I did not accept.

"We don’t want you here, Hugo. We don’t want you! Mrs. Thomas muttered loudly. Three years earlier, Judge Daniel Holcombe Thomas had informed Black that he was one of Alabama’s most distinguished sons and later would tell one of Black’s relatives about the warm reception that his friend" Hugo had received at the bar association. Now, however, Thomas sat stone silent allowing his wife’s indiscretion, which he usually hushed, to have full range.¹

"I had a telegram from some people down in one of the Southern states, Black remembered. After sixteen years of self-imposed exile, Black was at long last telling one of his favorite stories publicly down in one of the Southern states, in his own beloved Alabama. At my home [in suburban Washington] there was at one time a colored family that lived right behind my house. As a matter of fact, they were in speaking distance. More than speaking distance. They were on part of the original lot on which my house is occupied, Black said. The telegram was from a group down in the neighboring state of Florida—their ‘affection’ for me had extended all the way down to the state of Florida. The group wanted Judge Black to live with the horrible" racial integration that Brown mandated. So, they had taken up a collection in order to buy a house and put a colored family close to me.

I wrote them, the Judge continued, and told them I appreciated the favor, but I’d rather they just send me the money . . . because I already had a colored neighbor right behind me!

Laughter and applause erupted from the audience, including a handful of African Americans who appeared unconcerned that during this time of America’s black power and black pride movements the Judge spoke about the colored, a term of identity replaced two decades earlier by Negro and more recently by black in respectful public discourse. In Washington, Black’s law clerks had changed his draft opinions more than once over the years by writing Negro in place of their judge’s references to colored. And, when remembering his Alabama years in court chambers across from the nation’s Capitol, Black occasionally had been heard praising a friend for his Anglo-Saxon courage.

If Judge Black seemed woefully unaware of his outdated patterns of speech after more than three decades closeted within the small circle of the nation’s highest court, he did know—without benefit of Dorothy Thomas’ outbursts—that his role in placing constitutional law behind the principle of equal rights for all people, regardless of race or color, had earned him the undying hatred of many of the South’s white people and their leaders. Since 1954, tons of mail had told him so. Come down, Hugo, to Alabama, taunted one anonymous letter, you s.o.b. Another informed Black that white Southerners wanted to beat your damn brains out and warned: should you make a ‘return trip’ to Alabama, it will be your last trip on earth.

Most Alabama editors were less threatening, but equally hostile. Years after the Brown decision, for instance, the Greensboro Watchman still fumed: Hugo Black is a great lawyer, its editor admitted, but he is more than that. He is an apostate, a turncoat, a quisling. He is any other thing as long as it is an opprobrious term meant to describe a man who used his people—his benefactors—for all they are worth and then turned on them.

In past years, Judge Black had worried that this hatred might endanger the safety and welfare of his law clerks, who were mostly from Alabama and the South, if they returned home to practice law. Black’s own son, Hugo Jr., was a lawyer who left Alabama after years of enduring anonymous phone calls condemning his daddy as a nigger-lover. Massive, white anger made it impossible for anyone named Hugo Black to win a jury verdict before Birmingham’s all-white juries. In turn, Black’s law clerks and family had dreaded invitations for him to appear publicly in Alabama or the Deep South. To their relief, Black refused all invitations after 1954 because he knew that either danger or embarrassment would befall him and his Court if he made a publicized visit in Dixie.

Though the intervening years had dampened the hostility, Judge Black remained a man who inspired vitriolic hatred among whites of every rank. I wouldn’t walk two steps to see that old scalawag, proclaimed a taxi driver as he ferried guests from the airport to the Parliament House, then Birmingham’s poshest, modern hotel where the marquee openly welcomed Justice Black. Many whites in Alabama—from judges and their spouses to rural editors to working people on the margin—remained unwilling to forgive or forget, as if their own sense of Southern honor, perhaps their own identity depended on a lingering loathing. He’s done more to tear down white men, proclaimed the cabbie, than any other white man in the world.²

By the summer of 1970, after years of resistance, white Alabama had been forced by the Supreme Court to live with the end of legal segregation: integrated lunch counters, blacks on civil and criminal juries, and the votes of thousands of African American citizens. In fact, the growing presence of black voters had produced an emerging, fragile style of biracial, statewide politics for the first time since the 1890s. This development accounted for the fact that among the hundreds of lawyers and dignitaries standing to applaud Judge Black were Governor Albert P. Brewer and Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Howell Heflin.

A month earlier, the state’s senior U.S. Senator, John J. Sparkman, had conspired with Black’s former clerks to assure that the Judge would attend the event. The senator asked Black to accompany him personally in a meeting with the nation’s new chief justice on the pretext that Sparkman needed Black’s help in convincing Warren E. Burger to travel to the Alabama Bar Association’s meeting. For Black it was a puzzling, rare request, the first time since 1954 that an Alabama member of Congress had sought his counsel and assistance. Sparkman had entered politics supporting an incumbent Senator Hugo Black in the 1930s, but he and every other Alabama politician had kept their political distance after Brown. Until now.

Overshadowing this remarkable public endorsement was the harsh, complex reality of Alabama and its politics. Despite promises of change, Alabama was obsessed and manipulated by massive racial fears and hatred. A month before the bar meeting, white Alabama voters had defeated Albert Brewer, a New South moderate, and once more elected George Wallace who employed a simple runoff campaign: Promise them the moon and holler nigger, Wallace said.

Needing the governor’s chair to sustain a planned run for president in 1972, Wallace had attacked Brewer as a sissy and the tool of black militants. Earlier in the summer, Wallace’s radio ads had asked white men to suppose your wife is driving home at eleven o’clock at night. She is stopped by a highway patrolman. He turns out to be black. Think about it . . . Elect George C. Wallace. His campaign flyers showed an innocent, unsuspecting little white girl in her bathing suit surrounded closely by seven gleeful, half-clad black youth. This Could Be Alabama Four Years From Now, the ad warned, BLACKS VOW TO TAKE OVER ALABAMA. As Wallace said to a local white official, If I don’t win, niggers are going to control this state. Conjuring up the sullen, awesome powers of a long racialist tradition, Wallace won.

Now, within the campaign’s echoes, Hugo Black had returned home to a state that still could not accept his Court’s principle of simple justice and to the welcoming admiration of a coterie of public officials who, for the most part, were victims of Wallaceism. Howell Heflin, an oversized, beguiling judge with a courtly, grandfatherly manner, followed in time Hugo Black and his own fanatically racist uncle, Cotton Tom Heflin, to serve cautiously, but honorably, in the U.S. Senate; however, the other state politicians involved in Black’s homecoming were Alabama’s walking wounded—moderate, timid leaders bludgeoned by the revival of racist demagoguery and now congregating like baleful Irishmen whose memory of a victorious time long ago offered the only solace.

To deflect public criticism or embarrassment, this homecoming had been publicized as an occasion for Alabama lawyers to meet Warren Burger, who had not visited the state since becoming U.S. chief justice. This ruse, too, had complications. Burger had been appointed by President Richard M. Nixon—whom Black greatly distrusted—in hopes that the Midwestern jurist would lead the Supreme Court to curtail many of the judicial decisions which Black had written or joined. Yet, Justice Black loved his Court more than anything else—other than the U.S. Constitution, the South, and Alabama—and he readily agreed to accompany the chief justice to the state. Until about five minutes before he entered the hotel’s banquet hall, Black did not realize the occasion’s true purpose.³

Black’s former clerks had kept the event’s true purpose a secret because they feared that, without a pretext, Black would decline another invitation to appear publicly in the state. They knew that while the risk of embarrassment, misunderstandings, and danger lingered, this convocation might be the last opportunity to celebrate their judge in his own home as one of Alabama’s few living prophets.

Even without knowing he would be guest of honor, Justice Black was deeply affected by the prospects of any type of public appearance in the state that twice elected him to the U.S. Senate. Weeks before the trip, he awoke in the middle of the night, worried about how to manage a public reunion with friends, politicians, former clerks, and family. Now, however, as he stood before the huge crowd in Birmingham, Hugo Black glowed with confidence, ebullience, and genuine, boundless joy.

I do want to just say this, Black stated after promising to be brief, it is a great pleasure to be back in Alabama. Like a lost survivor unable to realize that he had returned to the Promised Land, Black dwelled on what was obvious to everyone around him. "I love Alabama. I love the South . . . So far as I know not a single ancestor that I ever had settled north of the Mason & Dixon line. They were all Southerners. And so, I am a Southerner."

It was, of course, this very fact that had unleashed the deep, widespread hatred of Judge Black. Many white Southerners believed Black had betrayed his own people, his own friends by forcing the South to dismantle its social customs and, in the words of innumerable Alabama politicians, by destroying the very foundation of Southern civilization. In truth, he had done a great deal more. Hugo Black stands among a small number of Southerners who had a profound influence in shaping America and American government in the twentieth century. Beginning in the 1930s in Washington as a U.S. senator, he helped the nation out of the Great Depression, prompted a vast reorganization of the nation’s airline and utility industries, developed the first federal statute limiting Congressional lobbying, and authored America’s first minimum wage law.

As a member of the U.S. Supreme Court, Black was the earliest prophet of America’s judicial revolution that radically transformed the nation’s governing system, requiring by the 1960s that all agents of government respect an individual citizen’s basic liberties regardless of race, religion, region, or income. Because of Justice Black’s rulings, American citizens on both sides of the Mason & Dixon line, for the first time in the nation’s history, enjoyed entitlements of the Bill of Rights—individual freedoms specifically mentioned in the Constitution that no government official at any level, in any county or hamlet, could lawfully ignore. Judge Black had written hundreds of opinions—many now the law of the land—expanding the rights of free speech to those whom society considered unpopular, weak, poor, zealous, or hated. During the bleak years of McCarthyism, few, if any, Americans provided a steadier moral force to fight against the nation’s self-consuming hysteria about disloyalty and communism than Judge Black. In the 1960s he authored the Court’s decree giving every poor American facing serious imprisonment a right to a lawyer. He joined his brethren in forcing the South to grant the right to vote to black citizens and in requiring all state legislatures to reapportion fairly. In addition, he wrote the Court’s opinion that banned religious prayers from the nation’s public schools.

These contributions to American life and law were unique for a white Southerner and prompted people of good will throughout the nation (primarily outside the South) to admire and honor him. But, no less impressive and fascinating was Hugo Black’s own mysterious, personal journey from obscure, rural Alabama in the nineteenth century to a rare national prominence in the late twentieth century. Indeed, few public figures in modern American history and among the South’s own in national political life appear by modern standards to embody so many contradictions and ironies, as rich and poignant as any cultivated in Southern literature. Some of Black’s contradictions were known by legal scholars, critics, and many of the people before whom Black now stood. Some were within memory of only a few friends who, like Black, had survived from another century. Others Hugo Black had kept to himself or his family out of shame.

Together, these incongruities seemed legion—between Black’s early days in Alabama and later years on the Supreme Court; between his national, judicial pronouncements and his Southern, political role; between his public persona and his actual person. Often they arose as a natural, innocent consequence of his having endured with a strong, vivid personality through the different fashions and fickleness of several eras, but in other cases the differences appeared on their face as products of purely opportunistic or morally indefensible conduct.

Here, for example, stood a man who never completed high school, never attended a liberal arts college, but who became one of the leading intellectuals of American jurisprudence. The son of a deeply conservative, rural merchant who opposed the Populist movement in the nineteenth century, Hugo Black became one of the first U.S. senators from the South in the twentieth century to propose radical economic reform in America. As a practicing lawyer, Black never wanted to try a case in federal court, although once on the federal bench he became one of the nation’s earliest advocates for the federal courts’ duty to protect any and all citizens from violations of fundamental Constitutional rights.

In Washington, Black was the author of the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion banning Christian prayers in America’s public schools, and in Birmingham he was for twenty years a Baptist Sunday school teacher whose Bible classes in the 1920s were larger than most preachers’ congregations. In the course of one lifetime, few people seemingly exceeded Hugo Black in his distrust of most newspapers and news media. And no one outranked him in America as the judicial defender of the press to print whatever they pleased, without restraint whatsoever. A man of strict, prudish morals—a genuine juris-prude—Black stood virtually alone in the history of the American judiciary in his constitutional belief that pornography could never be censored.

On the Court, Hugo Black made it particularly more difficult to arrest and convict people of crimes, while in Alabama he worked tirelessly as an aggressive prosecutor who complained often about too many rights for criminal defendants. One of the U.S. Senate’s most aggressive and successful investigators, often accused of overriding sacred liberties in the 1930s, Justice Black became the century’s foremost judicial critic of unchecked, damaging Senate investigations in the 1950s. On the Supreme Court, Black was the steady advocate for equal rights and an opponent of racial injustice, but as a lawyer in Alabama he was a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan. And, finally, no one loved the South and its white people more deeply and was hated by them more vehemently than Hugo Black.⁴

Almost all in the crowd at the Parliament House on July 17, 1970, were eager on this occasion to forego any recognition of the enigmas and problems of their prophet’s past, but, as an old man whose life held many yesterdays and few tomorrows, Hugo Black seemed bound by his own internal compass to return to that mysterious past, as if he could not speak of the present without searching backward. My mother’s people came from the state of South Carolina . . . Others of her people came from Virginia . . . Our people . . . were Irish, recalled the Judge vaguely. As a matter of fact, the family tradition says that they left that country of Ireland in order to escape being hung, the Judge declared. They were said to be related to Robert Emmet who was executed in Ireland for attempting to overthrow English rule. As a boy I was brought up on Robert Emmet’s speech on the gallows and it was magnificent—magnificent then and magnificent now, Black proclaimed.

My friend Frank Johnson here, I don’t know if he is Irish, Black wondered aloud, as he looked across to the federal district judge from Montgomery, but he does have some of the same traits that made Robert Emmet famous. Since his appointment to the federal bench by President Dwight Eisenhower, Frank M. Johnson had faithfully followed the sentiments and direction of Black’s Supreme Court and now rivaled Hugo Black for distinction as the most hated white man of Alabama. After years of publicly criticizing the district judge as an integrating, scalawagging, carpet-bagging, race-mixing bald-faced liar, George Wallace later suggested that Johnson deserved not a hanging, but a barbed wire enema. His old friend Frank, Black now observed, was a fighter for the things he believes in. And that was true of Robert Emmet. And, of course, that was true of Hugo Black.

Reminiscences now cascaded through Black’s mind, as he remembered past decades. This is very familiar ground to me, he continued, because I had an accident right out in front of this Parliament House back in nineteen hundred and three. At that time, I was a student at the Birmingham Medical College, he recalled. Although his young hands and head were studying medicine, Black’s heart was captured by the law, and he had been on his way downtown to the Metropolitan Hotel’s lobby to listen to Birmingham lawyers swap stories of their courtroom triumphs.

Rambling through flashes of memory, as the audience sat in complete silence, Black seemed caught in a turnstile of time. Over the decades, Black’s personal memory of his Alabama years had become very selective, often recalling the best and forgetting the worst. It was the natural habits of old age—and self-protection. If depicted without context or content, Black’s worst moments in Birmingham easily would portray him as godfather to George Wallace, an egotistical demagogue gladly using bigotry to advance personal ambitions. The images that no one in July 1970 would recall included:

•Black standing before an all white jury ridiculing a crazy nigger woman and nigger men who traveled on a train from Chicago to Birmingham as news boys’ screamed Read All About Race Riot outside the Birmingham courthouse.

•Black standing in another Birmingham courtroom adjusting window blinds to assure that an all-white jury saw a hostile Puerto Rican witness as a black-skinned negro or dago in an effort to free a fundamentalist Protestant preacher who killed an unarmed Catholic priest.

•Black parading solemnly in a white hood and full, flowing regalia with other masked members of Birmingham’s Ku Klux Klan as they formed a massive human symbol of the fiery cross crackling before them.

•Black standing next to the Ku Klux grand dragon as he smiled at the packed assembly of Klansmen indulgently cheering his acceptance of a lifetime, gold membership card in the brotherhood whose members recently had helped elect him as Alabama’s newest U.S. senator.⁵

NOW SPEAKING WITHIN TEN BLOCKS of that erstwhile Klan hall where he accepted the gold Kluxer card, recalling the years of an innocent, young medical student’s arrival in Birmingham, Black betrayed no outward signs of envisioning his own worst images. In truth, it did not matter. Disappearing years and contemporary symbols of popular culture had surpassed the meaning of his past choices and conduct. A full, honest portrait of this complex man, his nature, and his living principles, one surviving throughout three tenses of time, would require a detailed accounting of the events, currents, and human choices of each era through which he lived.

Black’s complicated past in Alabama, including both his best and worst moments, involved far more than one person’s journey in one Southern state. By birthright, Black seemed destined to navigate his life along the lodestars of America’s struggles for freedom, prosperity, justice, citizenship, diversity, and unity. In 1886, when Hugo Black’s father christened his arrival on earth with a curse, distant events and voices across America were foreshadowing the persistent, pivotal themes that would shape his life and the life of his nation.

After immigrant families contributed thousands of pennies for its construction near Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty arose in New York’s harbor in 1886. The statute became the nation’s premiere beacon of hope as Americans fought over the ideals and reality of democratic inclusion. In the same year, union leaders established the nation’s largest, enduring labor organization, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and in Chicago suffered one of its deepest historic tragedies, the Haymarket Trials of 1886, where eight editors of a union newspaper were convicted of murder and, afterwards, four were hung entirely because of their words and association—not their actions or deeds. The evidence at trial proved only that the union editors advocated in writing armed resistance against capitalistic aggression and spoke on the day of a deadly bombing about the need for workers to arm themselves. In law, the Haymarket Trials stand perhaps as the American legal system’s deadliest punishment of the exercise of free speech and association, and, in labor history, they mark the beginning of America’s onerous struggle to create an industrial, democratic society.

In 1886 in the nation’s capitol, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark case on American citizenship. Three years after striking down federal laws prohibiting racial discrimination—effectively removing freed slaves and their descendants from the practical protections of the U.S. Constitution—the nation’s highest court held that the American corporation (a relatively new creature) was a person under the Constitution and entitled to the full protections of due process of law. Thereafter, for three-quarters of a century, the Supreme Court barred the federal government from protecting African American citizens against rabid racialism while, in effect, vigorously requiring state and federal governments to protect corporations as full citizens.

In the same year, two decades after the end of the Civil War, Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady proclaimed the arrival of a New South, as he recalled before Northern capitalists the words of a born-again Southern secessionist: There was a South of slavery and secession—that South is dead. There is a South of union and freedom—that South, thank God, is living, breathing, growing every hour. Grady’s notion of a region where everyone puts business above politics captivated the imagination of the nation’s businessmen and politicians who used the South’s oppressive white supremacy and biracial poverty to expand Northern industry, while creating a social mirage of a New South. Into the twenty-first century, the New South would persist as both the hope and a myth of racial progress and define the vague ambitions of a region and nation too busy creating the future to reconcile the past.⁶

Yes, from birth Hugo Black seemed marked by the currents of destiny to chronicle America’s struggles for democracy in a new, modern world. Yet, destiny is only the future once interred to the past. Only in reference to that past, only by remembering his own history, could Hugo Black speak of himself in the present tense. And only there—in those past years that had disappeared largely from public memory and recognition—would anyone find the true measure of Black’s achievements and, finally, discover the rhyme and reasoning of his riddled life.

1

‘Til Death Does Us Part’

THE W. L. BLACK FAMILY OF CLAY COUNTY

At age twenty, shortly before Christmas 1868, Martha Ardellah Street Toland stood encircled by friends before the Rev. M. M. Driver and swore before her Baptist God that she would love and cherish William Lafayette Black, in sickness and in health, for the rest of her life. She made her holy vow in her father’s house in Bluff Springs, Alabama, near Hillabee Creek running between Jet Mountain and Mount Ararat, where within living memory Andrew Jackson’s soldiers had massacred the Muskogee Indians. If Della did not know at that moment, two years after her solemn baptism and eighteen years before the birth of her last child, Hugo, that she would break her vow during a lifetime of tribulation, both she and her new husband understood that theirs was a marriage of ambition and tragedy far more than of passion and love. A tall, stout young man, slightly younger than his bride, with a winning manner and a large, handsome face seemingly unruffled by toil or trouble, Fayette Black’s features masked a relentless, overriding desire to get beyond the hardscrabble life of his father and family. Fayette and everyone else along Hillabee Creek knew that he had won the hand of an attractive, petite woman from a more substantial family, a manly prize in the poor Southern backwoods of a dispirited nation recently at war with itself. They also realized that her heart truly belonged to Fayette’s older brother, Columbus, killed five years earlier on the battlefield which Abraham Lincoln memorialized as the final resting place of those who here gave their lives that our nation might live.

Columbus Black left home to enlist in the Confederate Army shortly after his seventeenth birthday in 1861, only a few months after Fort Sumter. He had added a year to his age when he signed with Alabama’s Fourteenth Infantry Regiment. Typical of many of the twenty-seven thousand young Alabamians who enlisted in that first, innocent year of wartime, Lum left a family and a small farm—worked without slaves or profit—for the excitement of battle in defense of the South, the only homeland he could imagine or ever know. And he left Della Street Toland who, like other girls of thirteen at the edge of America’s interior wilderness, was approaching an acceptable age for marriage.

Fayette and Della may have been brought together first as teenagers in a shared vigil, awaiting the news of battle and the safe return of her sweetheart and his brother. Southern newspapers reported with enthusiasm Confederate triumphs and heroism in the early years of war, but victories for the South often had heavy losses, and news of the dead and wounded traveled home much more slowly. In the summer of 1862, as General Robert E. Lee frustrated the Union armies around Richmond, the Confederates charged the bluecoats near Frayser’s Farm, south of the rebel capital, where fighting deteriorated into confused, hand-to-hand combat. The Fourteenth Alabama . . . was nearly annihilated, reported the commanding general. More than three hundred men were wounded, missing, or dead. With the grace of Della’s prayers, Lum survived, although his regiment continued with only a ghost of its original, youthful strength.

A year later, Lum died on the second day of Gettysburg, a battle which foreshadowed the end of a dream for the Confederacy and for young Della. Filtered through time and religiosity, family legend tells that Lum cried, Lordy, Lordy . . . as he and other Southerners fell during General George Pickett’s disastrous charge from Seminary Ridge. Military records suggest that Columbus may have been wounded in a rearguard action after Confederate General Ladmus Wilcox moved his men forward to divert the assault on the survivors of Pickett’s charge, in a series of maneuvers that could not prevent General Lee’s first major defeat.

Wherever Lum died, whatever his last words, his death was a profound, enduring sadness for Della. The War always marked her memory of grief without glory (a sentiment her first children would keenly feel) and her initiation into a world of faith where God’s word filled the space usually occupied by a young woman’s playful joy and passion. When news of Lum’s death reached Fayette, around his fifteenth birthday, he sought honor and vengeance as best he knew how. He ran away to join the rebel army, to take up where his brother had fallen. George Walker Black, however, did not intend to lose another son—at that moment his only boy old enough to help work the fields. The elder Black went after Fayette and returned him to their farm near Pinckneyville, not far down Hillabee Creek from Bluff Springs.

Little survives to tell of Della’s courtship with her loved one’s brother, after the shock of Lum’s death receded, although local customs would have had Fayette approach Della with a formality that governed all relations of life and death blessed by the rural Primitive Baptist church. The young couple may have attended worship services together or sat on the Toland porch within the sound of her father’s voice. Their conversation may have been gay and lively at times, although just as likely it was punctuated with long periods of silence, moments of sorrow or meditation for her, times when his words could not avoid the remembrance of how death had brought them together. Fayette’s act of youthful valor, attempting to take his brother’s place on the battlefield, endeared him to Della who, like her own mother, treasured fidelity. Yet while Lum’s death brought the couple together, his memory also sat between them, assuring a romance without the ripe sweetness of passion or temptation.

In an age and place where a woman’s role was to procreate a large family and nurture children to work the fields, Della aspired for slightly more. She took a grammar school education, rare for a girl in an area where almost everyone of both sexes worked at hard labor with their hands and backs from the age of seven to death, which often came before a person’s fiftieth birthday. Della’s uncle Merit Street, who briefly had been a schoolteacher, may have taught Della to read and write from the Bible. Unlike the vast majority of women (and men) in Alabama during these years, Della’s literacy gave her the only available means to traverse worlds and ideas far different and removed from the eighty square miles of backwoods that mapped the territory of her entire life.

Yet, when her mother died two years before the Civil War, Ardellah at the age of eleven was awakened from all childhood dreams and ambitions. She stopped schooling and took up the duties of the oldest child in a household without a woman and with two younger brothers. Her mother’s last words were the Biblical psalmist’s, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name! Chiseled on Mildred Street Toland’s tombstone atop Mount Ararat, the verse stood as a testimonial to holy faith, allowing a mother to die in peace with her young children on earth, and teaching her oldest daughter how to cope with a stolen youth, Lum’s tragic death, and, afterwards, years of quiet suffering.

Fayette, too, was relatively well educated, beyond the necessities of his time and place. He received at least a tenth-grade education, considered useful only for a boy who did not plan to spend the rest of his life behind a mule and plow. The Black family had been small farmers, backwoods merchants, or itinerant laborers as far back as the family tree records. For at least three generations, they had been working uncultivated soil and moving whenever free land or more opportunity beckoned from the other hillside. A man of limited resources, George Black moved to Alabama from Georgia on his wedding day in 1835. He endowed the names of national heroes on his boys—Washington, Columbus, and Lafayette (the last after the French nobleman who became a general in the service of George Washington to free the American colonies; the General passed through Georgia and Alabama in 1825 when George Black was a boy). Yet, the harshness of rural life quickly demeaned these birthrights, and common speech ground the expectations of Columbus down to the monosyllable Lum. Fayette was the one Black son whose common name needed two syllables and whose ambitions would not be worn down by death, farming, or a young man’s infatuations.

Fayette seemed to want all that George Black did not possess. The boy wanted off the farm to see the world. He wanted an easier life, without rural boredom and strenuous work. He wanted the excitement and pleasures that money—not youthful lust or real love—seemed to buy. Any day that he could slip away from his father’s farm chores, Fayette walked ten miles to and from school. He was not seduced by the pleasures of learning, but education gave him the means to locate his future. School was far better than working the farm, and it was the only place, other than church, where he might regularly associate with the daughters of more prosperous families. By design or instinct, Fayette rejected the example set by his own parents, whose passions led them to conceive their first child three months before marriage. He acted as if far less interested in the impulses of amour than the promise of a useful relationship, one that could free him of the backwoods’ hardships and drudgery.

Della Street Toland was Fayette’s best opportunity for advancement. In east central Alabama, the Tolands and especially the Streets were locally prominent and relatively prosperous families. Della’s grandfather Toland, who witnessed the first years of the Civil War, had been born in Ireland and was brought with his family to the United States as they escaped the gallows for their involvement in the misfired rebellion that Robert Emmet led against the tyranny of English rule at the start of the nineteenth century. The Tolands arrived at Charleston and settled inland around Laurens County, South Carolina, where, according to family legend, they bought the area’s first cotton gin.

In a plantation area where black slaves outnumbered free whites, several Tolands became tradesmen, mechanics, and cabinetmakers, and others became professionals—doctors and lawyers who spread across the state and beyond. The Tolands lived in Laurens in 1824 when a young tailor, Andrew Johnson, opened a small shop thirty-one years before he would succeed President Lincoln. Later, Dr. H. H. Toland was celebrated locally for unending devotion to his wife, whom he embalmed and kept within an office cabinet for many years after her early death. Some Tolands moved to California. Della’s father graduated from Transylvania College in Kentucky in 1828 and moved to Alabama after Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the Creek Nation opened up lands for white settlement. The Tolands carried with them education, acquired skills, ambition, and often a tidy sum of money with which to build a new life.

The Streets, Della’s maternal family, were from Virginia where her great-grandfather, a Baptist preacher, had fought in the Revolutionary War. Della’s grandfather, Hezekiah Street, moved to Alabama around the late 1820s and established a small plantation in the shallow valley of Bluff Springs, a strip of unusual flat land that supported large cotton farms between the foothills and lakes of east central Alabama. Situated almost equal distance from a railroad line and Talladega, the area’s commercial center, Street’s plantation prospered. His descendants reported that he had more slaves than anyone else in the area, although county records suggest that the actual number might have been around ten. Street served in the Alabama legislature in the 1830s and was an important civic leader. He died in 1865, after witnessing the death of his daughter, Mildred. His son, Merit, took his father’s place as head of his family and of Bluff Springs.

Della’s Uncle Merit was a shrewd businessman even before he inherited his father’s mantle. Five years before the beginning of the war that freed his father’s slaves, at age thirty-two, Merit started the Street store about a mile from the family plantation. He was not only a merchant for the community but also its banker—a note shaver & money maker as representatives of the New York-based credit agency, Bradstreet & Co., called him. They immediately saw his business promise.

They found him prudent, industrious, thrifty, keen, and a close and tight trader of good habits. By their standards, St. Peter could not have given them a better client; Merit was as good as Shylock, Bradstreet reported.

After the Civil War, Uncle Merit was among the few Alabamians not devastated by the South’s defeat. He had served the Confederacy as the local justice of the peace, a safe, routine position of responsibility that he also held before the war. Merit’s two sons were born during secession and thus saved from the war’s casualty lists. At the time of Lee’s surrender, the state was destitute, without plentiful crops and with a worthless Confederate currency, but Merit Street possessed land, plentiful store goods, and eighty-five bales of cotton which he held until they could be sold for a princely sum of U.S. dollars.

When Della prepared to consummate her half-hearted courtship, she was a woman of twenty who held a special place in her uncle’s heart. She was a vivid reflection of his dead sister—her mother—in body, mind, and soul. Only a year before the wedding, Street had christened his own newborn girl Mildred Ardellah Street, in loving tribute to his dead sister and his young niece, only to watch his baby die ten days later. Through these ordeals of death, neither Merit Street nor Della questioned the love and wisdom of their Almighty, a shared devotion that all the more caused Uncle Merit to prize Della like a daughter.

When Fayette Black repeated his vows of matrimony with Della in the presence of the Tolands, the Streets, and others, he knew the marriage did more than join together two young people for the sake of love within the grace of God, family, and community. It was the union of her families with his future. It was as close as Fayette Black could get, by any means, to Merit Street and his growing fortune. Nothing on his wedding day or night could have excited Fayette Black more.¹

TWO YEARS INTO THEIR MARRIAGE, Fayette and Della faced the realities of living in a poor section of Alabama in the aftermath of a lost war fought primarily on Southern soil. While Della was occupied with the care of their first-born, diplomatically named Robert Lee for Lum’s commander-in-chief, Fayette remained where he did not want to be, facing the backside of a mule. In a tiny community called Harlan, not far from the intersection of two old Indian trails, the Blacks had built a modest timber and mud house on land that no white man had wanted before the War. Della’s relatives on the Toland side were nearby, and the house was about five miles from Uncle Merit’s store. Yet, the land was uncultivated and had to be cleared of trees and underbrush to permit farming. Fayette had broken only a few acres, and all his worldly possessions and money did not exceed two hundred dollars. He had discovered that, while Merit Street dearly loved his niece, he also loved his own money, which he managed frugally, reverently, as if it measured not only man’s industry but his sacrifice and devotion to God—all qualities Street expected of himself and others.

Despite his eagerness to leave his father’s house, Fayette had moved into an even more modest existence: George Black’s farm in Pinckneyville, with the labor of one of Fayette’s younger brothers, was worth in 1870 three times as much as Fayette’s homestead, and several former slaves in Clay County were as well off as Fayette. For an ambitious white man, this was a humble status.

Throughout post-War Alabama and the South, conditions remained mercilessly difficult. Near Talladega, white families were living in the woods in makeshift huts. Former slaves were often the victims of want, neglect, and rank racialism, as the system of labor after slavery became chaotic and often brutal. No one could offer regular employment outside of government, which was under the rule of black and white Republicans, none of whom were beholden to the families of Confederate soldiers now disfranchised in large numbers. As one partisan historian stated of the era: No means of livelihood, however humiliating, could be overlooked. The Roman adage that necessity has no law became a living principle in the struggle for bread.

The period of Reconstruction, more often called radical or carpet-bag rule by planters and past Democratic leaders, was inevitably a time of widespread suffering, the result of economic devastation after waging an unsuccessful, deadly war. Most Southern whites blamed the misery and disorder on the Republicans who ruled in Washington and Montgomery, the state capital. The new government was attempting to establish a new society in the South against the will of the white population. Its motives and actions were often anything but pure, as Republicans pumped large public investments into favored, private railroad construction. But the fundamental breach between the government in Montgomery (maintained by a standing federal army) and white citizens across the state was a bitter disagreement over whether the end of slavery should require legal, political, or social equality with former slaves. In the mind of white society, Yankee carpetbaggers, Southern scalawags, and ignorant blacks were responsible for the whole of Southern defeat, indignity, and misery foretold at Gettysburg and persisting into the 1870s.

In parts of Alabama, local white leaders abandoned the rule of law as much for power as bread. Reinventing the role of the justice of the peace, who once had the duty to select respectable men to patrol the local community for the protection of civil order and moral standards, whites organized private, secret societies to reestablish a white man’s rule through bluff, intimidation, and violence. The Ku Klux Klan was the more common order, although others such as the White Camellias used the same techniques of nightriding, anonymous circulars, and whippings to frighten blacks and whites who supported Reconstruction. Secret societies existed in counties surrounding Clay (Talladega and Randolph), but they weren’t active in Fayette Black’s community. In fact, during the War numerous white men had fled Confederate conscription into Clay’s rough mountainous terrain. Unwilling to fight a war they did not support or understand, these renegades lived in exile until General Lee’s surrender. As in several other counties in the Alabama hill country (especially Winston, which had seceded from Alabama when Alabama seceded from the Union), Clay’s white citizens never had been entirely of one mind about which was worse—freed blacks or the old white society which the secret organizations were attempting to restore.

Amid limited opportunities and desperate conditions, Fayette remained trapped for eight long years on his farm in Harlan, as he slowly cleared more land and planted more crops. In 1872 he and Della had their first girl, Mildred, named after Della’s late mother, Uncle Merit’s sister. Within three years another boy was added, named Orlando after Della’s Toland uncle who had become a successful doctor in California. Meanwhile, instead of toiling to clear more ground, Fayette tried to establish a herd of cattle which the law permitted to roam freely on unfenced land. This practice required little or no sustained effort for much of the year, especially in unpopulated areas like Harlan where cows with free range weren’t likely to disturb others. Yet, nothing seemed to improve circumstances greatly for the Black family or anyone else in the area.²

The end of Fayette Black’s life of subsistence came, finally, when Reconstruction was overturned in Alabama. In 1874 a white Democrat was elected governor for the first time since the end of the War, primarily due to a divided Republican party and a momentary coalition of white voters from both north and south Alabama. The election returned the machinery and patronage of state government to the white men who had believed in the cause of secession. As part of the self-styled Redeemers’ reform, Alabama’s legislature reestablished the elective position of justice of the peace, two for every precinct in every county. In August 1877, Fayette Black was elected justice of the peace for a three-year term in Clay’s Wickers beat.

By 1877, the Democratic and Conservative Party of Alabama had restored many former Confederate leaders and followers to the voting rolls. And to help guarantee that only the right class of citizens held office, state law required local elected officials to post an assurance bond in an amount far beyond the means of almost all citizens. In the case of a local justice of the peace, one thousand dollars of property or cash was needed. With total assets of around $250, about the Alabama household average, Fayette Black had to rely on the sponsorship of the far wealthier Merit Street.

Everyone else in Clay County seemed to have suffered decline or stagnation during Reconstruction, but Street had enlarged his wealth as a merchant and expanded his business as a silent partner in at least three other dry goods stores in surrounding communities. By 1873, the last year of Alabama Reconstruction, New York mercantile agents were referring to Uncle Merit as the wealthiest person in Clay County, with a net worth of at least fifty thousand dollars. Adding to future prosperity, Street’s store in 1875 became the location for the Bluff Springs post office, where everyone in the community had to come to pick up their mail. Also, Street now sat on the Democratic party’s county executive committee, a body of approximately fifteen men who set the rules and qualifications for elections.

Along with Street, Joseph Allen White also signed as a surety on Fayette’s justice of the peace bond. White had been elected a JP in 1875 and