The Sotomayor nomination was not particularly controversial, as such things go. There were some rough spots, to be sure, but in the main the lengthy confirmation process reflected the political reality that Judge Sonia is the very sort of jurist Barack Obama was expected to name to the Supreme Court, and had she not been confirmed, someone very much like her in due course would have been.

Three Alabamians have served on the U.S. Supreme Court. The last to do so, Hugo Lafayette Black of Ashland, exerted more influence over the development of American constitutional law than all but a relative handful of the judges in the Court’s entire history.

Black was nominated by President Franklin Roosevelt on August 12, 1937, and the Senate confirmed him to the high Court within a mere week. Although this seems an inconceivable rush to judgment by today’s standards, in 1937 it was considered somewhat a delay. As a sitting U.S. Senator, Black’s confirmation by Senate colleagues normally would have been automatic, and virtually immediate. But, for the first time since 1888, the Black nomination was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which approved him on a 13-4 vote. The full Senate debated for most of a day before confirming Black 63-13.

There is zero chance that Hugo Black’s nomination could have survived the scrutiny facing any nominee today. In the modern political climate the president, without question, summarily would withdraw the nomination from a disgraced nominee. Black, you see, had joined the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s, presumably to further his political career, though he had quit the Klan shortly before entering the Senate in 1926. Indeed, Black had addressed a statewide Klan gathering in the very year of his first Senate election.

Black’s “hooded” history was a matter of unproved speculation at the time of the abbreviated confirmation debate. Rumors were rife, however, and the NAACP and other African-American groups formally opposed him to no avail.

Enterprising investigative journalists broke the truth about Black’s embarrassing past late in the summer, but only after he had already taken the judicial oath of office. Time magazine scathingly observed that “Hugo won’t have to buy a robe, he can dye his white one black.” A national scandal erupted, and even FDR demanded an explanation.

Justice Black rose to the occasion, and gave a radio address forthrightly admitting his former Klan membership, though denying that he either participated in Klan activities or really considered himself a Klansman at all. The public remained skeptical, and the media didn’t buy his story either. American Mercury even called Black “a vulgar dog.”

Black did not easily live down the stigma of his “Kluxer” past. When the Supreme Court began its fall term in October 1937, the new justice had to sneak in through the basement, because angry protesters had converged upon the building. Over the course of the next three-and-a-half decades, however, Black forged a distinguished judicial career generally characterized by a high regard for the constitutional liberties afforded all individuals.

Hugo Black died in 1971, only eight days after resigning from the Supreme Court for reasons of ill health. His was a remarkable career, incredibly important to the history of American jurisprudence. In one of those ironies, which make the study of history so interesting, the ex-Klansman from Alabama became a stalwart of the liberal Warren Court that so transformed American law and society in the 1950s and 60s.

Carl Sagan once made this rather idealistic appraisal of the late Justice Black:

When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in substantive debate, people have been known to change their minds. It can happen. For example, Hugo Black, in his youth, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan; he later became a Supreme Court justice and was one of the leaders in the historic Supreme Court decisions, partly based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, that affirmed the civil rights of all Americans. It was said that when he was a young man he dressed up in white robes and scared black folks; when he got older, he dressed up in black robes and scared white folks.”

Yet in a candid 1967 New York Times interview, which Black gave only with the understanding that it would not be published until after his death, the by-then esteemed elder justice revealed that his youthful flirtation with the Ku Klux Klan had nothing to do with philosophy or politics, but rather everything to do with winning cases as a trial attorney:

You want to know the main reason I joined the Klan? I was trying a lot of cases against corporations, jury cases, and I found out that all the corporation lawyers were in the Klan. A lot of the jurors were too, so I figured I’d better be even-up. I haven’t told that before, but that’s how it was. People think it was politics, but it wasn’t politics. I wanted that even chance with the juries.”

All irony aside, that is an explanation which this lawyer can understand, and believe.

For further reading:

• “Justice Black Dies at 85; Served on Court 34 Years” from New York Times, September 25, 1971
• Hugo L. Black: Cold Steel Warrior by Howard BallPhoto: Library of Congress / the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Written by: Greg S.

That community, of course, is Moundville, site of a huge Native-American settlement centered on the Black Warrior River. Moundville was a political and religious center of the Mississippian civilization of mound-building American Indians, who flourished in the southeastern United States centuries before the Conquistadores appeared. The mound at Nanih Waiya near Philadelphia, Mississippi, dates from the same period, as do many similar sites throughout the Southeast.

The mound builders of antiquity once thoroughly captivated white Americans, but for all the wrong reasons. Mounds from even earlier periods are found throughout the present-day eastern United States, with most located in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions. The prevailing assumption among European settlers, especially during the first half of the 19th century, was that the mounds could not possibly have been constructed by the “primitive savages” then occupying the land. Since the “primitive” American Indian, by default, was deemed incapable of having achieved the advanced culture evidenced by the existence of the mounds, the explanation for them, quite naturally, must lie elsewhere.

Many alternative explanations sincerely were put forward to explain the mounds, most of which were posited upon the idea that a transplanted (usually European-based) advanced culture thrived in North America before being extinguished by the red savages. Vikings were given credit, along with Greeks and Africans-–anyone, it seems, but the Indians. The most enduring explanation was that the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel had escaped to America, and that it was they who had built the mounds. The Book of Mormon expounds upon this theme, although the New York hill on which Joseph Smith reportedly found the golden plates he translated is likely a glacial formation, and not an Indian mound.

The mystery of the mound builders was dispelled in the 1890s by entomologist, biologist and archaeologist Cyrus Thomas, whose 730-quarto-page, small-type exhaustive investigative report for the Smithsonian Institute’s Bureau of Ethnology definitively concluded that America’s mounds indeed were constructed by early Native-American tribes, and not by intrepid Vikings or wandering Israelites. Curiously, when the mystery finally was solved, white Americans largely lost interest. After all, if the Indians had really done it, how important could it all be, seriously?

Human nature is like that, I suppose. We enjoy our special prejudices. When I was a law-school student at Vanderbilt, my surname (Snowden) excited much curiosity among Tennesseans who inquired as to whether I was related to the Memphis Snowdens, an eminent family of West Tennessee, near-founders of the city, wealthy pillars of the community and, indeed, long-time owners of the Peabody, emblematic of the very heart of Memphis. Tennessee Williams, in fact, wrote his very first play on Snowden Street.

Alas, the interest waned considerably when I explained that my Snowdens hailed from Lauderdale County, Mississippi, and that any kinship to the scions of Memphis necessarily was quite distant.

People are funny that way, you know?

Written by: Greg S.

Napoleon Bonaparte, probably the foremost figure of the 19th Century, once cynically observed: “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” Sir Winston Churchill, arguably with Hitler the central figure of 20th-Century history, similarly said that “History is written by the victors.” Why, then, do many people today regard the study of history as an essentially irrelevant memorization of static facts and figures, dates and disasters, wars and woes? History and, more to the point, the study of history, whether academic or casual, is an ever-changing discipline, a moving target, if you will. Historical understanding is rarely firmly fixed.

Consider the following excerpt from the standard Bettersworth 1964 school text account of the forced removal of Indian tribes from Mississippi in the 1830s:

“The Indian cessions had an electric effect upon the state. In just two years, Mississippians had managed to secure for white settlement a tremendous expanse of desirable land in the northern part of their state. At a great banquet staged in Natchez in October 1830, President Andrew Jackson was toasted as a man who ‘found our territory occupied by a few thousand wandering Indians. He will leave it to the cultivation of thousands of grateful freemen.’”

History, like the Bible, never changes, but our own knowledge, appreciation and understanding certainly may, and should. The quest for historical knowledge is ongoing, and only the most intellectually narrow cling to a close-minded, unquestioning certitude.

It is unimaginable that any mainstream historian writing today would reference the Choctaw “Trail of Tears” in the optimistic language employed by Bettersworth. Indeed, even within his own lifetime (mid-1970s), Bettersworth’s increasingly archaic account was challenged by a new generation of historians, James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis, in Mississippi: Conflict & Change, their own school textbook considered highly provocative when first published:

“Americans resented the fact that relatively few Indians controlled much more land than they ever used for farming. White Mississippians were accustomed to the idea that one person owned a definite piece of land. They could not understand the Indians’ idea of the entire tribe owning all the land together. Whites considered the land almost vacant, unowned and unused. They did not see—or if they did see, did not care—that land to the Choctaws and Chickasaws was more than just a farm. It was their homeland, the resting place of their ancestors and the center of their religion. Finally, many Americans simply wanted the chance to grab part of the new land, resell it at a profit and become rich.”

Same facts, but assessed from a strikingly different cultural perspective, and obviously yielding a vastly different interpretation. Was Bettersworth right or wrong in his assessment, interpretation and presentation? If wrong, how wrong was he? Is judging right or wrong even an appropriate inquiry to make at all? Unless the study of history really is the stale, static exercise many assume it to be, these always are pertinent and timely questions (among many) by which to vet any historian’s body of work.

History, like the Bible, never changes, but our own knowledge, appreciation and understanding certainly may, and should. The quest for historical knowledge is ongoing, and only the most intellectually narrow cling to a close-minded, unquestioning certitude. Curiosity and humility in equal parts are essential if one truly intends to understand the present through the ever-shifting lens of the past.

Summersell knew well the truth of this, as I personally can attest. Bettersworth did as well, I suspect. All of us, bar none, necessarily are limited by our own life experiences–our innate and acquired prejudices, if you will. Though molded by past eras, history’s writers and readers alike, not less than history’s participants, ultimately are the products of their own time.

New learning and fresh understanding becomes available to us every day, even (perhaps especially) in the study of history. Prepare for it, seek it out, embrace and cherish it. This is history’s gift, and God’s, to you and to your children.

For further reading: You may enjoy “Much More Than A Textbook,” an article by Richard Coles in the Spring 1976 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review, available online here.

Written by: Greg S.

John K. Bettersworth and Charles G. Summersell indeed were wise men of extraordinary learning and talent. They were never, however, law partners, or even lawyers at all. Indeed, although I assume they were at least acquaintances (they were contemporaries, and may have been fast friends, for all I know), they were not collaborators in their respective contributions to Mississippi and Alabama schoolchildren.

Bettersworth wore Mississippi State maroon; Summersell wore Alabama crimson. Professional historians both, the former rose to the vice presidency of Mississippi State University, and the latter served on the University of Alabama history faculty for 43 years, 16 as department chair.

Summersell was born in 1908; Bettersworth but a year later, in 1909. (For reference, my daddy was born in 1910). All are now dead. I never personally met Bettersworth, though I had the high privilege of taking classes from Summersell during my undergraduate tenure at the Capstone (1972-76.)

I remember Dr. Summersell best from the ridiculously challenging undergraduate examinations he administered, and from the remarkably generous manner in which he graded those exams. His essay tests were deviously designed to cause the student to examine and explore any number of plausible alternative answers; yet, once graded, it appeared that no one solution was particularly preferred over another, so long as one’s ultimate answers legitimately were supported by the course material.

Between the two of them, a full generation or more of these two states’ young people were exposed to the vital and violent history of their shared Deep South homeland.

Dr. Summersell’s purpose, I came to appreciate, was to force the student to think, to work it out, to delve into various alternative hypotheses, and to choose and defend one (of many) explanations available. This was, I think, the essence of his understanding of the discipline of history. As it turned out, the intellectual obstacle course posed by Summersell’s history exams proved excellent preparation for Vanderbilt Law School, where I matriculated after earning a history degree at Bama. (Summersell proudly sported a Vandy graduate degree also, along with his two UA diplomas.)

I had “met” Bettersworth much earlier in my life. Bettersworth authored Mississippi, Yesterday and Today, which, during my childhood, was the standard public school history text for Mississippi children. Summersell, of course, was the creator of the Alabama counterpart: Alabama History for Schools. Between the two of them, a full generation or more of these two states’ young people were exposed to the vital and violent history of their shared Deep South homeland.

Napoleon Bonaparte, probably the foremost figure of the 19th Century, once cynically observed: “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” Sir Winston Churchill, arguably with Hitler the central figure of 20th-Century history, similarly said that “History is written by the victors.” Why, then, do many people today regard the study of history as an essentially irrelevant memorization of static facts and figures, dates and disasters, wars and woes?

Come back tomorrow for “Part 2: Bettersworth & Summersell–A look at two neighboring historians.”

Written by: Greg S.