Griffin Speaks

HUGO BLACK AND THE KKK

The KKK supports the extinction of all African Americans, Catholics and Jews. The group strongly endorses the separation of the races believing that the only way races can develop their full potential and culture is through racial separation. 

United States President Warren G. Harding, became a Klan member and was sworn into membership inside the White House. The Klan organization increased its membership by 50% in 1930 bringing the total enrollment to two million members.  

The first leader of the Klan was Nathan Bedford Forrest in 1865 in Stone Mountain, Georgia. The name Ku Klux Klan came from the Greek word “Kuklos” which means circle or wheel. The Klan is credited with driving federal troops out of the South. This is why the Klan was and is considered by many racists to be the saviors of the White South. The KKK launched a terrorist campaign against blacks, but the race survived despite the reign of terror from the Klan. 

One of America’s greatest Supreme Court Justices was a member of the Klan in Alabama. Hugo Lafayette Black was an Alabama Senator, born near Governor Bob Riley’s hometown of Ashland, Clay County Alabama, on February 27, 1886. He graduated from the University of Alabama Law School in 1906; and was admitted to the Alabama Bar that same year. He practiced in Ashland, Alabama for a short time and then moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 1907 and continued the practice of law. He was a police court judge in Birmingham, Alabama; prosecuting attorney in Jefferson County, Alabama and elected to the United States Senate in 1926; reelected in 1932 and served from March 4, 1927 until his resignation on August 19, 1937, after being appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. 

Hugo Black was not a true racist but a politician who believed that in order to win political office in the South their were some things that one had to do. In the South during that time to be electable, you had to join the Ku Klux Klan. 

Justice Black’s service on the United States Supreme Court proved that he was not a racist. He was a staunch opponent to racial segregation and he was a champion of minority rights. The case that best demonstrated Justice Black’s position on race was Chambers v. Florida. In 1940 Chambers was one of 40 blacks arrested after an old white man was robbed and killed in Pompano, Florida. Many of the blacks were held in the Dade County jail and questioned for over a week. They were often kept up all night with questioning until they broke down and confessed. The arrested Black men were not allowed to speak to an attorney or family or friends. 

Each of the Black men was questioned separately while surrounded by ten white men. They were constantly threatened and physically abused by law enforcement officials. After a week four of the men broke down and confessed. 

Two days after the men confessed, formal charges were brought against them and they were indicted and arraigned. Two of the men pleaded guilty and two of the men pleaded not guilty. Later one of the men who pleaded not guilty changed his plea to guilty. Chambers was the only one to stand trial. He was convicted of murder based on his confession and the testimony of the three men who pled guilty. When the Florida Supreme Court learned that the confessions were coerced and not voluntary the first conviction was thrown out. The case was tried again in a different county and the four men were convicted again. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the second conviction. The case was then appealed to the United States Supreme Court. 

The Supreme Court overturned the conviction of all four black men. In writing his opinion for the court, Black said:

·                                 “The determination to preserve an accused's right to procedural due process sprang in large part from knowledge of the historical truth that the rights and liberties of people accused of crime could not be safely entrusted to secret inquisitorial processes. The testimony of centuries, in governments of varying kinds over populations of different races and beliefs, stood as proof that physical and mental torture and coercion had brought about the tragically unjust sacrifices of some who were the noblest and most useful of their generations. The rack, the thumbscrew, the wheel, solitary confinement, protracted questioning and cross questioning, and other ingenious forms of entrapment of the helpless or unpopular had left their wake of mutilated bodies and shattered minds along the way to the cross, the guillotine, the stake and the hangman's noose. And they who have suffered most from secret and dictatorial proceedings have almost always been the poor, the ignorant, the numerically weak, the friendless, and the powerless.” 

Justice Hugo Black was a great man and a great Supreme Court Justice and I forgive the mistake he made earlier in his career by joining the Ku Klux Klan. Its not where we begin in our careers that matter most, it is where we end up. Hugo Black definitely ended up on the right side of Justice.