Justice Hugo Black: the closet Klansman

When Franklin Roosevelt attempted to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937 by adding up to six new justices, he sweetened the deal for reluctant senators by announcing the first new vacancy would be filled by Sen. Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas. Robinson was folksy and popular, and had been Alfred E. Smith’s running mate on the Democratic ticket in 1928. A southerner and a “dry” on the issue of prohibition, he balanced the ballot nicely. It also helped that he had delivered a scathing rebuke to anti-Catholic sentiment on the floor of the Senate, winning over Al’s mackerel-snapping heart.

Robinson died suddenly, and the chances of FDR’s power grab succeeding died with him. Then fate played its fickle hand once more when crusty old Justice Willis Van Devanter announced his retirement. Roosevelt could have made history by appointing Florence Ellingwood Allen, whom he had elevated from the Ohio Supreme Court to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals three years earlier. Civil rights advocates led by H.L. Menken, the “sage of Baltimore” pushed for the appointment of Robert L. Vann, the African-American publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier. But FDR opted to appoint Sen. Hugo L. Black of Alabama, an ardent New Dealer and loyal soldier in the court-packing fight.

What FDR didn’t know is that he had appointed a former Klansman who owed his political career to the power of the invisible empire. Rumors flew, but Black lied and denied them all. It wasn’t until after he was confirmed that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a copy of Black’s letter of resignation from the Klan. Oops.

The KKK was first formed in the wake of the Civil War as a sort of confederate VFW, and adopted rituals and structures that aped other fraternal orders common at the time, like the Masons and the Odd Fellows. It soon morphed into the unofficial terrorist resistance to the northern occupation. The Republicans agreed to abandon the reconstruction of the south in exchange for stealing the election of 1876, and left the fate of former slaves in the hands of landed bourbons and backwoods sheriffs. Spurred by novels like “The Klansman” and films like “Birth of a Nation” (which Woodrow Wilson screened at the White House), the Klan made a comeback during the xenophobic hysteria that followed The Great War, and Klansmen got elected in states well outside the south with negligible black populations. Hatred of French-Canadian immigrants helped make the Klan huge in Maine, and Klan darling Owen Brewster, a Mayflower descendant and Harvard-trained lawyer represented Maine in the U.S. Senate for over 30 years. Klansman Benjamin Stapleton, was by all accounts a pretty good mayor in Denver, and they named the airport after him. His grandson is currently state treasurer and a good bet to move up.

An anti-Klan plank was voted down at the Democratic convention of 1924, and Klan candidate William Gibbs McAdoo was almost nominated for president. He later represented California in the U.S. Senate and was chairman of the board of American President Lines in Oakland. Soon many members grew disenchanted with the overly political thrust of the organization, and petty scandals became common. Then, in 1925 D.C. Stephenson, grand dragon of Indiana was convicted of rape and homicide and spilled all his secrets to the Indianapolis Times when the governor refused to grant him a pardon. By the time the depression took hold, the mighty Klan was again mostly a memory.

Unfortunately for Hugo Black, it was a memory most Americans could not abide. Black then took to the airwaves to quell the firestorm and his explanation drew more listeners than any previous radio address save one: King Edward VI’s abdication of the British throne for the woman he loved. Black’s version of events was that as a young lawyer he had joined the Klan just to drum up business, just as he had when he joined the Masons and the Knights of Pythias; that it was all just a little white lie. And the chapter he joined was a benign one, that “all the preachers belonged to it.”

His version didn’t hold up. In the first place, when he joined it the Robert E. Lee chapter in Birmingham had a decidedly unsavory rep, given that it had sponsored the beating of a public health officer who believed sickness among blacks was every bit as bad as sickness among whites. After his election to the Senate, Black attended a Klan Kolorea, where Klan Kahuna Hiram Evans presented Hugo with a “Grand Passport” entitling him to all the benefits of Klan brotherhood for life. Black accepted it enthusiastically, and attributed his electoral victory to “men who advocate the principles of this organization.”

During his term in the Senate he did everything he could to stanch the Wagner-Costigan anti-lynching bill, and in 1932 he took to the floor to oppose a relief bill that benefitted blacks and whites equally. Even his Alabama colleague, big, big, bigot Tom Heflin blushed.

More important is the fact that while an attorney Black once represented a gang of Klansmen who had been indicted for the murder of Catholic priest James Coyle. Father Coyle had committed the sin of converting a prominent Klansman’s daughter to Romanism and then presided over her wedding to a mongrel Cuban. As a Klansman himself, Black was well-aware of the code words and hand signals that members used to communicate surreptitiously, which no doubt helped him to select a jury bound to acquit.

During his time on the court Black joined the majority upholding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, but his views on race slowly evolved, and he joined the majority in Shelly v. Kramer, declaring restrictive racial covenants unenforceable by state courts. He was a steadfast first amendment absolutist, insisting in Time Inc. v. Hill that the nuanced approach to New York Times v, Sullivan urged on the court by attorney Richard Nixon be ignored.

He confided to his second wife that had it not been for the Klan furor he, and not Harry Truman would have been FDR’s running mate in 1944, and therefore president. Many years after the scandal broke, she stumbled upon his Grand Passport in a drawer and destroyed it. The legacy of this sordid chapter was best summed up by the great debunker himself, H.L. Menken who tartly observed that “Justice Black won’t have to spend any money on new robes. He can just dye his old ones.”