Is There Hope for Bannon? Remembering Anti-Catholicism and Justice Hugo Black’s Turn from Hate

If you don’t know about Hugo Black, he was a Supreme Court Justice from 1937-1971! He began his political career by defending a KKK member who murdered a Catholic priest. At the time, the KKK targeted Catholics along with Jews and Blacks.

This hatred is interesting because it was also rooted in immigration. The KKK linked Catholicism with several waves of Irish immigration, beginning in 1840, and surging again in the 1920s, when Black was cutting his teeth in politics. Before being elected to the Senate in 1926, Black delivered 148 speeches at local Klan gatherings, where he attacked Catholicism.

A series of news articles exposed his connections to the KKK shortly after he became a Supreme Court Justice. Justice Black did not deny these reports. Over time, he became a staunch defender of civil rights for African-Americans, voting, for example, in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate public schools.

Steve Bannon is Catholic. He would have been terrorized by KKK members in the 1920s-- but today, the KKK has "modernized" by replacing Catholics with their xenophobic hate for Muslims. (Jews, on the KKK hate list in the 1920s, are still on the hate list.)

As noted by Richard Stockton, “it was said of Black that in his youth he dressed in white robes and scared black folks, in his later years he dressed up in black robes and scared white folks.” If Hugo Black’s heart could change once he had great power, maybe there is hope that Steve Bannon will learn from the KKK’s violent anti-Catholicism, not far removed from his birth in 1953.

Photo Credit: Anti-Catholic cartoon depicting the Church and the Pope as a malevolent octopus, from the H.E. Fowler and Jeremiah J. Crowley's 1913 anti-Catholic book, The Pope: Chief of White Slavers High Priest of Intrigue.