E. R. Stephenson

Who was E. R. Stephenson?

Reverend Edwin Roscoe Stephenson was a minister of the now extinct Methodist Episcopal Church, South and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He shot and killed Catholic priest James Coyle on August 11, 1921, in Birmingham, Alabama, but was acquitted of the murder. His main lawyer was Hugo Black.

Stephenson was a son of William Franklin Stephenson and his wife Mary Jane Gillespie. Born In Georgia, he had moved with his family to Alabama in 1882. A side-line clergyman, Stephenson worked as a barber and married people, for a fee, in the Jefferson County Court House. In 1921, six months after his father died, he became incensed when his only daughter Ruth converted to Catholicism. A known member of the Ku Klux Klan, he could not restrain himself when 18-year-old Ruth married a Catholic, Pedro Gussman, whose Spanish parents lived in Puerto Rico. The marriage ceremony had been performed by Father Coyle. On the afternoon of August 11, 1921, the enraged Stephenson fired three shots at Father Coyle on the porch of St. Paul's rectory. There were many witnesses who heard but didn't see the actual shooting. Stephenson turned himself in to the authorities a block away.