Some historic events take hold in the collective memory of a community, and in Birmingham, Alabama, one such event is the 1921 murder of Catholic priest James E. Coyle. The priest is still revered by many Alabama Catholics, and St. Paul's Catholic Church, where Coyle served, maintains a Web site titled “The Father James E. Coyle Memorial Project” (www.fathercoyle.org). The church holds a memorial mass each year on the anniversary of his death. The killing is mentioned or discussed in many Birmingham histories, but Sharon Davies, a professor of law at Ohio State University, has produced the first book-length study of the case, Rising Road. Making good use of trial transcripts, grand jury records, newspapers, and eye-witness accounts, Davies reconstructs the crime, the resulting trial, and the virulent anti-Catholicism of the time.

Born in Ireland in 1873, Coyle was ordained at the age of twenty-three and sent to serve the growing Catholic population in Alabama. In 1904, he was appointed rector at St. Paul's. As pastor for Birmingham's oldest and largest Catholic congregation, Coyle became a spokesman for Catholic interests in the largely Protestant community. As anti-Catholicism became increasingly virulent in Birmingham and throughout the United States (one anti-Catholic newspaper, published in Missouri, had 1.6 million subscribers nationwide), Coyle wrote frequent letters to local newspapers responding to attacks from the Ku Klux Klan and its local fellow travelers, a group known as the True Americans. To many in Birmingham, Coyle became the face of the Roman menace.

Amid this anti-Catholic hysteria, Coyle gave instruction in the Catholic faith to a teenager named Ruth Stephenson, the daughter of a Methodist minister. Her father, Rev. Edwin Stephenson had no church but instead hung around the Jefferson County Courthouse, next door to St. Paul's, and performed marriages. Edwin Stephenson despised Catholics and was a member of the Klan. Ruth's mother shared his views. But despite her parents' beliefs, Ruth converted and ran away from home. Using his connections in the Birmingham police department (some officers were also Klansmen), Stephenson had his daughter forcibly returned and held the young woman prisoner for a time, tying her to her bed and administering brutal beatings. On the afternoon of August 11, 1921, Ruth Stephenson left her job early at a downtown department store to secretly marry a paper hanger named Pedro Gussman. Puerto Rican and Catholic, Gussman was several years older than Ruth. The two had met when Gussman did work at the Stephenson home. Father Coyle performed the marriage. Later that day, as the priest sat on the front porch of the parish rectory, Edwin Stephenson shot Coyle to death. Stephenson said later that he had gone to St. Paul's to talk with Coyle, but he shot the priest when Coyle attacked him. An eye witness, who was not called to testify, said Stephenson walked onto the porch and immediately opened fire before Coyle had a chance to stand.

Stephenson was arrested for the murder and stood trial in October 1921. Defense attorney Hugo Black (who later represented Alabama in the United States Senate and was appointed by Franklin Roosevelt to the U.S. Supreme Court), played to Birmingham's racial and religious prejudices. Suggesting to the all-white, all-male jury that Gussman was probably a Negro who had married a white woman (Ruth), Black also pursued two contradictory lines of defense. He claimed that Edwin Stephenson had shot Coyle out of self-defense and that Stephenson had shot Coyle while suffering from temporary insanity. As the author points out, this was a risky strategy. The self-defense claim argued that Stephenson made a rational decision to defend himself, while the temporary insanity defense rested on the claim that he acted irrationally. In the end it did not matter. The jury found Stephenson not guilty. The murder of Father Coyle received national news coverage and demonstrated that Catholics were not only subject to discrimination but, in some places, could be murdered with impunity. The crime was condemned around the country and by many in Alabama, including the state's governor.

Unlike many historians and journalists who have written about Birmingham, Davies does a good job of placing the city's violence and intolerance into a broader national context. She also uses her legal expertise to explain the intricacies of Alabama law and the legal proceedings and make them accessible to nonexperts. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Alabama history, the history and experiences of American Catholics, legal history, and the history of the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations.