The Irish priest killed by a KKK member for performing an interracial marriage Story by Laura Grainger • 11 June 2023
The Ku Klux Klan terrorized communities in the southern states of America for well over a century.
With its first wave established in response to the Union victory in the American Civil War which brought about the nationwide end of slavery, the organization's initial aim was to overthrow the federal government in the south through voter intimidation and violence against Black Americans and their allies.
Black people remained its primary target for the second and third waves, but the group also set its sights on almost anyone who wasn't , or who associated with those who weren't, white, straight, Protestant and American-born.
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Just a few years into the Klan's second era, which began in 1915, the killing of an Irish Catholic priest by a Klansman highlighted that whiteness wasn't enough to protect a person from the wrath of white supremacists. Although he was the same race as those who made up the KKK, Fr James Coyle's card was marked for a number of reasons.
He was an Irish immigrant, he was Catholic, he advocated for immigrants and poor people of all races in letters to local newspapers, and he married a white Methodist woman, who also happened to be the daughter of his killer, to a Catholic Puerto Rican man in 1921 Alabama.
Coyle was born in Co Roscommon. He was ordained in Rome at the age of 23 and later set sail to the US with another priest in 1896.
He initially worked for the Catholic Church in Mobile, Alabama under Bishop Edward Patrick Allen. In 1904, the bishop appointed him to succeed the late priest at St Paul's Church, now the Cathedral of St Paul, in the Alabama city of Birmingham.
Fr James Coyle, an Irish Catholic priest murdered in 1921 by a member of the KKK
© Public Domain
He would remain there for 17 years until he was killed by a fellow clergyman, though this clergyman was of a different Christian cloth. By the year of his death, Birmingham was not only a heavily segregated city, but a hotbed of anti-Catholic sentiment with a significant KKK presence.
Local Methodist minister Edwin Stephenson worked next to the St Paul rectory at Jefferson County Courthouse, where he assisted couples in obtaining marriage licenses and performed wedding ceremonies. A former barber, he was also a member of the KKK who hated Catholics.
Stephenson's daughter Ruth fell in love with a Puerto Rican man named Pedro Gussman. The couple reportedly met when Gussman was working at Stephenson's home and were married five years later by Fr Coyle in a secret ceremony on August 11, 1921.
Months prior, Ruth told her father she had converted to Catholicism. When she was nowhere to be found on the day of her wedding, Stephenson tried to obtain a warrant to search St Paul's rectory for his daughter.
He could not find a judge and so returned home to get his pistol and storm the property himself. Fr Coyle was on the porch reciting prayers when Stephenson approached and fatally shot him three times in front of witnesses.
Stephenson claimed that when he arrived at the rectory and asked where Ruth was, Fr Coyle told him about the marriage, then hit him and seemed to reach for a pistol. It was at that point that Stephenson fired his own pistol, he said, though there is no evidence to suggest Fr Coyle actually had a gun.
Stephenson was charged with the priest's murder and the case went to trial. The KKK paid for his team of five defense lawyers, four of whom were Klansmen, led by future US Senator and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black.
He was ultimately acquitted in what was considered a major miscarriage of justice. The judge assigned to the case, William E Fort, was a Klansman, as was Birmingham police chief and star witness to the defense Thomas Shirley, as well as most of the members of the jury, who acquitted< Stephenson by reason of temporary insanity.
A Ku Klux Klan ceremony on Stone Mountain in Georgia, 1921
© Bettmann/Getty Images
The defense's arguments also appealed to the racist and anti-Catholic sentiments of the time. They used the prosecution witnesses' Catholicism as a means to discredit their testimonies and asserted that Stephenson was justified in his anger at his daughter's marriage as he believed Gussman to be Black rather than Hispanic.
Stephenson faced consequences from neither the State nor the Methodist Church. He returned to his position as "the marrying person" at the courthouse and was given a seat of honor at Alabama Klan rallies.
While Fr Coyle and the community he served never got justice for his killing, his legacy is still remembered to this day. The Cathedral of St Paul held a commemorative mass on the centenary of his death in 2021.