This book describes, in narrative form, the true story of the 1921 killing of Father James Coyle by Edwin Stephenson, a Protestant minister, in retaliation for Coyle’s marriage of Stephenson’s daughter to Pedro Guzman, a Catholic. The shooting took place in Birmingham, Alabama and Stephenson was represented at his subsequent trial by a young Hugo Black, before Black joined and then resigned the Ku Klux Klan, was elected to the U.S. Senate and appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Stephenson’s subsequent trial was one of the first “trials of the century,” and Sharon brings her expertise in criminal law and procedure to bear on that gripping drama. Yet, through painstaking historical research and compelling writing, the book offers much more. A page-turning narrative places readers in the United States of 90 years ago in fully realized detail. The landscape of the interplay between family, social attitudes and legal regulation on the one hand, and race, religion and marriage on the other, reveals itself through Sharon’s explication of these events, with the result that the book provides some shocking perspectives on the not-so-distant past and some familiar and enlightening perspectives on some debates that are still with us.

Here is the beginning:

There was little to distinguish Thursday, August 11, 1921, from any of the other days that choked Birmingham that week beneath a blanket of heat, with the exception that Ruth Stephenson and Pedro Gussman chose it as their wedding day. And likely the unremarkable character of the day was part of the couple’s plan, as they would have wanted a day with as little to commend itself as possible. A day less apt to stand out; one that would draw no attention. As if only on a day so pedestrian, and by a strategy uncluttered by its particulars, could they ever hope to bring the thing off.

The trouble was not that the law prevented Ruth Stephenson and Pedro Gussman’s union, though in 1921, like most states, Alabama had a great deal to say about who could marry whom, and who could not ....

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