I have not seen the RTÉ Would You Believe? documentary on the murder of Fr James Coyle in Birmingham, Alabama in 1921, reviewed by John Gibney in the May/June 2010 issue. I have, however, read Rising Road, (Oxford UP, 2010) the book on the case by Sharon Davies, a law professor at Ohio State University, which is also reviewed in the same article, and a few comments may be helpful.

The first thing that must be said is that Professor Davies shows only a limited knowledge of the Irish context to some of Fr. Coyle’s activities. For example, she describes the 1798 rebellion as part of the Irish fight for ‘home rule’ without any apparent awareness of the specific meaning of that term. In fact, of course, Fr Coyle was a supporter of the Sinn Féin movement (as discussed in HI Winter 2004, which describes his involvement with de Valera’s visit to Birmingham) and even notes him as expressing pro-German sympathies before the US entered the First World War). A 1941 article in which a Birmingham Catholic gives her personal reminiscences of the case (reproduced on the Fr Coyle memorial website which is maintained by a group of devotees) makes the interesting point that some Birmingham Catholics disliked his involvement in Irish politics: http://www.fathercoyle.org/newspaper/remember.htm

‘...how he loved his native Ireland, the poems he used to write about her and the articles and letters. Some there were who criticized him for his outspokenness on this subject, but the accumulated wrongs of all the centuries suffered by Ireland at that time culminating in the bitter death struggle of the Sinn Féin movement, bore heavily on his heart, and he cried out against the wrongs that hurt him terribly.’

Similarly, Professor Davies notes that in the spring of 1921 Coyle’s parishioners raised a subscription for him to make his first visit to Ireland for several years, and that he subsequently wrote from Ireland that he now considered Birmingham to be home and intended to spend the rest of his life in her service. One possible explanation for this declaration might be that, with the conclusion of the Anglo-Irish truce in July 1921 he felt that Ireland no longer needed external support and he should concentrate on his pastoral duties. (Unfortunately it is not clear from Professor Davies’ account—p.51—when in 1921 the visit took place and the letter was written.)

The second point is that Professor Davies faces a problem that confronts many authors of true-crime accounts. In a murder case the victim by definition cannot provide the point-of-view for the investigation and/or trial. Accounts centred on the perpetrator give him a privileged position. (An interesting attempt to address this is Jeff Kass Columbine: A True Crime Story [2009], which operates on a dual structure—each chapter contains two narratives, one describing the perpetrators’ planning process and the other describing the post-massacre investigation and the struggles of the bereaved so that the reader never loses sight of the consequences of the killers’ actions and how life went on after their deaths.) Professor Davies opts for a dual point of view. One strand centres on the conduct of the murder trial and the political context that enabled defence attorney Hugo Black to secure an acquittal by appealing to racial prejudice. The other is a much more imaginative attempt to reconstruct the thoughts and experiences of Ruth Stephenson, whose attempt to escape from her violent parents by conversion to Catholicism and marriage to the Puerto Rican Pedro Guzman was the trigger for Fr Coyle’s murder. This is a much more hazardous exercise, since it must rely on her pre-trial depositions and a post-trial interview in which she repudiated defence counsel’s presentation of her as a well-loved but wayward and ungrateful daughter and described the violence and imprisonment she had experienced from her parents. (She was not called to testify at the trial itself; Professor Davies suggests because defence counsel had stirred up such prejudice against her that the prosecutor feared her evidence would simply arouse more sympathy for her father. Some local demagogues even claimed that she had been Fr Coyle’s mistress, so that the prosecutor took the humiliating step of having Pedro Gussman testify under oath that she had been a virgin when they married.) Her marriage broke down under the strain of the case, and after her father’s acquittal she moved to Chicago where she married a Slavic steelworker and died of tuberculosis in 1931. Rising Road closes with a sombre description of the return of her body to Birmingham for burial by her parents, because her husband could not afford the funeral expenses. Over and over again Professor Davies contrasts the freedoms available to her today—and to women within a few decades of Ruth Stephenson’s death—with the restrictions of 1920s Birmingham.

Behind this story, and behind Professor Davies’ adoption of what to many readers will seem an overwrought style, lies the sorry history of American apartheid. Readers outside America will be aware in general terms of the long history of slavery and segregation upheld through legal and extra-legal violence, through a vast structure of formal laws and informal humiliations, but even the most cursory study of its details brings fresh surprises. The most visceral argument used in support of racial segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was that if blacks were permitted to socialise freely with whites this would inevitably lead to sexual relations between black men and white women. For example, in the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates Stephen Douglas places this at the core of his attacks on Lincoln’s anti-slavery views; the source novel for the notorious film Birth of a Nation explicitly tells its Northern readers that since everyone knows they would not let black men marry their daughters they are fools and hypocrites to condemn Southern racial segregation, which is the only sure way to prevent such an eventuality. In 1921 the majority of American states had anti-miscegenation laws; if Pedro Gussman had in fact been a black man (as defined by Alabama society), his marriage to Ruth Stephenson would have been legally invalid and they would both have been guilty of a criminal offence. Professor Davies is herself the child of a racially mixed marriage; in a blog entry about the book http://www.acslaw.org/node/15416

she notes that if her parents had been influenced by such laws she and her siblings ‘would never have been born...Simply having us was a crime’. When President Obama was born in 1961 his parents’ marriage would still have been illegal in many Southern states; anti-miscegenation laws were only declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia. Ironically, one of the Supreme Court justices who joined in the decision was none other than Hugo Black (who served on the court 1937-71).

The Coyle case continues to resonate in the culture wars of contemporary America. Advocates of gay marriage argue that its denial is comparable to the anti-miscegenation laws. (Professor Davies’ blogpost, linked above, indicates that exploring this parallel led to her interest in the Coyle case). Meanwhile, conservative critics of the dominant US Supreme Court jurisprudence on separation of church and state, in whose formulation Black as a Supreme Court justice played a significant role (e.g. Philip Hamburger Separation of Church and State—Harvard, 2002) have cited the Coyle case to argue that Black’s history of anti-Catholic prejudice unduly influenced his views on such matters as the constitutionality of state aid for Catholic schools. Thus the past lives on in the present.

Further information (including some primary material) about Fr Coyle and his murder may be accessed at the Fr James E. Coyle Memorial website, maintained by some Alabama Catholics who are promoting his cause for canonisation http://www.fathercoyle.org/index.htm