Black in White

That Alabama's Senator Hugo La Fayette Black was no stranger to the Ku Klux Klan was no secret in political Washington when the President nominated him to the Supreme Court. No one who had not been in the Klan's good graces could have been elected to the Senate from Alabama in 1926. So last month when Hugo Black's nomination was confirmed neither press nor politicians made a serious issue of the Klan. As twelve years ago there had been good political reasons for his making Klan connections, so there had long since been equally good reasons for severing them, and no one had the slightest doubt that his feeling for the Klan was even deader than the Klan itself. Last week, however, after all its political importance had passed, the question of Hugo Black and the Klan still seemed hot enough to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the North American Newspaper Alliance for them to start a series of articles exposing it.

Written by a Post-Gazette Reporter named Ray Sprigle, the first article in the series told that Supreme Court Justice Black had put on his white robes to take the Klan oath in the Klavern of Robert E. Lee Klan No. 1 in Birmingham in 1923; that in 1925, more than a year before the Senatorial primaries in which he defeated anti-Klan Senator Oscar W. Underwood, Hugo Black got Alabama's Grand Dragon and Great Titans to pledge him their support for the U. S. Senate; that the next step in the Black campaign was to write a letter of resignation from the Klan, to be produced if anti-Klan sentiment developed during the campaign.

According to Reporter Sprigle, Klansman Black's resignation was filed but never accepted and after winning the nomination, which meant the election, he reaffirmed his loyalty to Klan principals at an Alabama meeting attended by Imperial Wizard Hiram W. Evans, was rewarded by a gold Klan card making him a life member.

Said the Klan's Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans when reporters questioned him in Georgia: "I have not examined all the rolls of the Alabama Klan but I know Black is not now a member." Meanwhile the New York Times reported that Justice Black, vacationing in Paris, had dodged efforts of its correspondents to corner and question him. There was little wonder if Justice Black took refuge in the traditional prerogatives of the Nine Old Men of whom he now is one. Secure in a life job, he had little to worry about. If the past of the first liberal justice appointed by Franklin Roosevelt should prove more sensational than the past of conservative justices, the chief embarrassment will fall not on him but on the New Deal.

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