Associate justice of the United States (1937-1971)

As a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice, Black sought to define and in some areas extend constitutional protection of civil liberties, while delineating the prerogatives of government; for more than one-third of a century, he propounded the absolute inviolability of the Constitution as the basis of the nation’s jurisprudence.

Areas of achievement Law, civil rights, political science

Early Life

Hugo L. Black was the youngest of eight children. His father, William L. Black, was a country storekeeper who surrendered periodically to bouts of secret drinking; his mother, Martha Toland Black, from a well-bred family, was the village postmistress. From the age of six, the young Hugo attended trials at the Clay County courthouse in Ashland. He was educated for a while at Ashland Academy. He attended Birmingham Medical College for one year and, at the age of eighteen, enrolled at the University of Alabama. By virtue of his excellent academic record, Black was granted early admission to the law school and was graduated with the university’s LL.B. degree in 1906.

Black began his practice in Birmingham, where he pleaded labor cases and damage suits. He served briefly as a judge on the city’s police court; in 1914, he was elected the county solicitor, or prosecutor. Increasingly, he came to oppose, and sometimes took action against, the summary and forcible extraction of confessions from suspects. During World War I, Black enlisted in the Army and, although he was not called for combat duty, he was discharged as a captain in the field artillery. On his return to civilian life, he resumed his law practice in Alabama; in 1921, he married Josephine Foster, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, whose lovely dark features had attracted him. During the next twelve years, they became the parents of two sons and one daughter.

Black gave the impression of formidable tenacity and reserve. He was five feet, eight inches tall and wiry; his features were distinguished by his sharp, hooked nose and piercing blue eyes. He spoke in a gentle, melodious drawl that could be sharpened by interrogatory tones or softened with personal warmth. He had a brisk, energetic gait and, for recreation, played a vigorous game of tennis.

Life’s Work

While in private practice, Black occasionally had taken cases of white clients against blacks; as his political ambitions grew, he joined a number of civic organizations. In 1923, he made a decision that later seemed fraught with fateful implications: He became a member of the Ku Klux Klan . It may have been that for a time he was attracted by the Klan’s populist appeal, or that he recognized its political strength; he spoke to several meetings of the Klan and then, less than two years later, withdrew abruptly and unceremoniously. Black first emerged into national political prominence in 1926, with a spirited campaign that won for him a seat in the United States Senate. During the early years of the Depression, Black sponsored legislation to promote public works programs and called for a national thirty-hour workweek. In 1932, he won reelection on a platform of broad support for the national Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although he would not risk public disfavor on issues on which his home state was sensitive, such as a proposed antilynching law or the sensational Scottsboro rape cases, Black became nationally known as the chair of major Senate investigations of public utilities and airmail contracts. Moreover, though he differed with the Roosevelt administration on some economic proposals, he roundly condemned the Supreme Court’s rulings against New Deal legislation. Black became an early and staunch proponent of the administration’s proposal that would allow the president to appoint additional justices to sit alongside those on the Court who had passed the age of seventy. Much as this measure divided even the Democratic Party, Black’s standing in the Senate, and his broad agreement with the administration on economic and judicial matters, were vital considerations when Roosevelt nominated him, in 1937, to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice Willis Van Devanter. While Black was confirmed easily enough the same year, questions about his Klan affiliation persisted and grew. In response to allegations in newspaper stories, the new justice delivered a brief and compelling statement, which reached millions of radio listeners, disavowing any connection with that organization since his resignation twelve years before.

Expectations that Black would be intellectually unsuited for the Court, or that he would act merely at the administration’s behest, were gradually shown to be unfounded. In spite of an education that was limited and exiguous when compared with those of other justices, Black was a fervent autodidact, and even during his years in Washington he had read widely in constitutional law; philosophy; American, British, and ancient history; and the social sciences. During his early years on the Court, Black evinced a basic support for the government on questions of antitrust and held with the administration on controversial economic issues. Questions of civil liberties were enlivened when he wrote the Court’s opinion in Chambers v. Florida (1940), which invalidated a criminal confession obtained during incommunicado confinement. In Betts v. Brady (1942), writing for himself and two colleagues, he contended that indigent defendants should not be convicted without the benefit of counsel. On the other hand, in Korematsu v. United States (1944), he held for the Court that wartime circumstances justified the forcible resettlement of Japanese Americans.

Black frequently found with a minority in cases that heralded the onset of the Cold War. In several notable dissents he maintained that communists and other radicals were entitled to the constitutional protection of free speech. In Dennis v. United States (1951), he argued in dissent that mere speech, albeit of an admitted communist, could not be proscribed as inciteful or tending to overthrow the government. Elsewhere, Black opposed loyalty oaths or other limitations on the civil liberties of avowed communists . In another celebrated dissent, Beauharnais v. Illinois (1952), he contended that the states could not abridge the freedom of speech by attempting to suppress white supremacist literature. On another front, in 1952, Black wrote the Court’s opinion in ruling against President Harry S. Truman’s use of government force to curtail strikes in the steel industry. Trying times on the bench were made more difficult by the early and unexpected death of Black’s wife in 1951. His outlook undoubtedly improved with his remarriage, to Elizabeth De Meritte, six years later.

After Earl Warren became chief justice, in 1953, the Court as a whole took a more expansive view of the civil liberties that Black had defended; other troubling issues also came before it. Justice Black held with the Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the landmark decision that struck down racial segregation in public schools. Black’s own concern for freedom of expression was further stated in Konigsberg v. State Bar of California (1957), in which he held for the majority that political affiliations, such as possible membership in the Communist Party, did not constitute grounds for an applicant’s exclusion from the practice of law. Black’s objections to other limitations on the freedom of speech were reflected in his opinions in cases of alleged obscenity, such as a New York case of 1959, involving the film version of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Black believed that the First Amendment afforded extensive protection against claims of libel, and he found with the majority in the celebrated case of The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964); he also did not consider massive adverse publicity grounds for retrial in criminal cases, and thus he dissented when such a case, involving Dr. Sam Sheppard of Ohio, was brought before the Court in 1966.

Black was often regarded as a moving spirit in many of the Court’s libertarian decisions, and, to nearly the same extent as Chief Justice Warren, his guidance was provided in controversial decisions. Black wrote for a majority on the Court when he found the sponsorship of prayer in public schools unconstitutional, in Engel v. Vitale (1962); in a matter of recurrent concern to him, the right of poor defendants to legal representation, he wrote the Court’s opinion in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963). Nevertheless, though there and elsewhere Black upheld the rights of criminal defendants, he dissociated himself from other decisions thought to be part of a liberal trend on the Court. He did not believe that public demonstrations or sit-ins, whether to promote racial equality or for other purposes, were speech in the strict sense, and thus he differed from his colleagues in holding that they were not protected by the Constitution. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), he dissented from the Court’s view that a right of privacy extended to married couples using contraceptives. Claims of increasing conservatism, or discomfiture with modern times, were bruited about, but Black persistently maintained that his constitutional faith was unchanged. His last official act on the Court was a separate opinion in the New York Times v. United States or Pentagon Papers case of 1971, in which he contended that the public had a right to know about the origins of a controversial war; the First Amendment precluded any exercise of prior restraint on the part of the government. For some time failing health had taken its toll, and at the age of eighty-five, Black suffered a sharp decline. On August 27, 1971, he was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital; on September 17, his resignation from the Court was formally tendered; and on the next day, he suffered a stroke, from which he died on September 25, 1971.

Significance

Black served under five chief justices; during his tenure on the bench, vital questions of the New Deal, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights movement came before the Court. Throughout this period, Black formulated and repeatedly maintained his adherence to a specific and distinct view of constitutional law. In his many opinions, presented for the most part in a clear, direct, unvarnished style, Black held that a literal reading of the Constitution bound the nation’s highest court to uphold civil liberties even, as arose with claims of libel and obscenity, in unusual and improbable contexts. On the other hand, Black increasingly objected to any legislative function on the part of the Court and rejected any implied doctrines that were not clearly stated in the Constitution itself. From this standpoint, it is useful to note Black’s long-standing debate with Justice Felix Frankfurter, who referred to other criteria, such as the balancing of rights and obligations, or the nation’s conscience, in deciding difficult cases. Black’s libertarian strain led him often to side with Justices Frank Murphy and, particularly, William O. Douglas; yet he maintained that beyond those rights clearly granted in the Constitution there were limitations, and toward the end of his term Black found the views of Chief Justice Warren E. Burger congenial.

It is a measure of Black’s importance in American jurisprudence that, though many of the cases and concerns with which he dealt have receded from public attention, the views he espoused still command respect. There will continue to be some dispute as to whether the resolution of modern dilemmas actually is implicitly stated in the Constitution. Some of Black’s opinions decidedly would find more present-day adherents than others, yet his simple but forthright reading of the Constitution must still be reckoned an important force in modern legal thought.

Further Reading

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Twentieth Century

1901-1940: March 9-June 16, 1933: The Hundred Days; June 25, 1938: Fair Labor Standards Act.

1941-1970: June 14, 1943: Supreme Court Rules That States Cannot Compel Flag Salutes; October 1, 1962: Meredith Registers at the University of Mississippi; March 18, 1963: Supreme Court Establishes Defendants’ Right to an Attorney; 1970-1971: U.S. Voting Age Is Lowered to Eighteen.

1971-2000: April 20, 1971: U.S. Supreme Court Endorses Busing to End School Segregation.