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Sharon Davies, Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 352. $27.95.
During the summer of 1921 in Birmingham, Alabama, Ku Klux Klan member Edwin R. Stephenson shot and killed Father James Coyle, the Irish Roman Catholic priest who had performed the marriage of his daughter earlier that day. Eighteen-year-old Ruth Stephenson had not only decided, months earlier, to convert to Catholicism, but she had without her parents' permission married an older, Roman Catholic man who called himself Spanish and traced his heritage to Puerto Rico.
Stephenson's lawyers, among them Hugo Black, the future Supreme Court justice, would successfully convince the white, male, and probably all-Protestant Birmingham jury to acquit Stephenson from the crime of murder because he acted in self-defense. After all, argued Black, "A child of a Methodist does not suddenly depart from her religion unless someone has planted in her mind the seeds of influence! .... There is such a thing as imprisonment of the human will by influence, vice and persuasion. When you find a girl who has...