Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America (review)

The establishment of the English-speaking colonies in North America was an anti-Catholic experiment. Except for Maryland, the Christian colonies were antipapist. The prejudice against Roman Catholics and Roman Catholicism continued throughout the course of the history of the United States until recent times; one may argue that expressing anti-Catholic prejudice is still publicly acceptable. Sharon Davies, professor of law at Ohio State University, vividly recounts one violent and fatal act of anti-Catholic prejudice in Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America. This thoroughly researched and well-written narrative recounts the murder of James Coyle, a Roman Catholic priest, on August 11, 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, by Edwin Stevenson, a Methodist minister. Stevenson’ s daughter, Ruth, had converted to Catholicism and had married a Hispanic Catholic, Pedro Gussman, in a service officiated by Coyle.

What is fascinating and significant about Davies’ s work is her judicious handling of the sources at her disposal. Using court transcripts, newspaper accounts, and church documents, Davies chronicles the anti-Catholic mood of the region, the state of race matters in the South, and the understanding of legal and extralegal justice in the early decades of the twentieth century. Davies demonstrates that Stevenson was not on trial when his case was finally brought before Judge William Fort’ s court; rather, this was a trial that would uphold family values, Protestant hegemony, and racial purity in the South.

A good portion of this work centers on the efforts of the county solicitor, Joseph R. Tate, to bring Stevenson to justice and those of Hugo L. Black, future Supreme Court justice and Ku Klux Klan member, to save him from the electric chair. Black and his colleagues portrayed Stevenson and his wife, Mary, as dutiful, yet somewhat indulgent, parents to a spoiled and disrespectful daughter. Black and company presented the Catholic Church as “other,” feeding into the religious bias of the region against the “intolerable alien.” The Hugo Black defense team, by questioning Gussman’s ethno-racial status, provided a justification for Stevenson’s action: Gussman violated that which was never to be violated in the South—racial purity. As the editors of the anti-Catholic New Menace argued before the trial took place, Stevenson should not be punished, as they believed that he “would rather have seen his daughter in her grave than a member of the papal church, married to a Catholic, destined to bring into the world a generation of half breed slaves to the papal system. . .” (p. 203). A jury of Stevenson’s white peers acquitted him on October 21, 1921, some ten weeks after he had shot Coyle in cold blood.

In a work that is suitable for graduate and undergraduate students as well as one that will appeal to the general public, Davies presents a cautionary tale of racial and religious intolerance. Such intolerance, unchecked, led to murder, unpunished. As Alabama governor Emmett O’ Neil commented after Stevenson’ s acquittal, “We have not advanced far from savagery or barbarism if murder is to be justified on account of the religious creed of the victim” (p. 281).