Sharon Davies – författare

In Birmingham, Alabama in 1921, an unstable and fiercely anti-Catholic Methodist minister named Edwin Stephenson shot and killed James Coyle, an Irish Catholic priest, in broad daylight on the rectory steps of his church. As it so happened, the fiercely intelligent priest had married the minister's 18-year headstrong daughter Ruth -who secretly turned to Catholicism at the age of 12-to Pedro Gussman, a 42-year old Puerto Rican of indeterminate racial ancestry. The resulting trial has virtually disappeared from historical memory, but it was a sensation at the time. It featured all of the elements of intolerance that dominated the era: Southern racism, anti-Catholicism, and xenophobia. Adding to the intrigue, the minister, a member of the recently revived Ku Kluxl Klan, hired future Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black as his defense attorney. Black would become a legendary champion of civil rights later in life, but in 1921, he was a few years away from joining the Klan himself. Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black based based his claim on his belief that the Puerto Rican husband was black, which not only was an affront to the Southern racial order, but clearly in violation of the state's anti-miscegenation laws. Sharon Davies tells this incredible story through a narrative of the romantic relationship between Ruth Stephenson and Pedro Gussman, but she positions it in its historical context: the hard-but-fraying racial and religious orders of 1920s America. Through the story of a heinous crime and its aftermath, Davies provides an epic account of the consequences of prejudice at the height of the Jim Crow era.

It was among the most notorious criminal cases of its day. On August 11, 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, a Methodist minister named Edwin Stephenson shot and killed a Catholic priest, James Coyle, in broad daylight and in front of numerous witnesses. The killer's motive? The priest had married Stephenson's eighteen-year-old daughter Ruth to Pedro Gussman, a Puerto Rican migrant and practicing Catholic. Sharon Davies's Rising Road resurrects the murder of Father Coyle and the trial of his killer. As Davies reveals with novelistic richness, Stephenson's crime laid bare the most potent bigotries of the age: a hatred not only of blacks, but of Catholics and "foreigners" as well. In one of the case's most unexpected turns, the minister hired future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black to lead his defense. Though regarded later in life as a civil rights champion, in 1921 Black was just months away from donning the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, the secret order that financed Stephenson's defense. Entering a plea of temporary insanity, Black defended the minister on claims that the Catholics had robbed Ruth away from her true Protestant faith, and that her Puerto Rican husband was actually black. Placing the story in social and historical context, Davies brings this heinous crime and its aftermath back to life, in a brilliant and engrossing examination of the wages of prejudice and a trial that shook the nation at the height of Jim Crow. "Davies takes us deep into the dark heart of the Jim Crow South, where she uncovers a searing story of love, faith, bigotry and violence. Rising Road is a history so powerful, so compelling it stays with you long after you've finished its final page."--Kevin Boyle, author of the National Book Award-winning Arc of Justice"This gripping history...has all the makings of a Hollywood movie. Drama aside, Rising Road also happens to be a fine work of history." --History News Network

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