Hugo Lafayette Black, 76th Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Hugo Lafayette Black (February 27, 1886 - September 25, 1971) was an American lawyer, politician, and jurist who served as a U.S. Senator from Alabama from 1927 to 1937 and as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971. A member of the Democratic Party and a devoted New Dealer, Black endorsed Franklin D. Roosevelt in both the 1932 and 1936 presidential elections.
Before he became a senator, Black espoused anti-Catholic views and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. An article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that he temporarily resigned from the Klan in 1925 to bolster his senatorial campaign, before quietly rejoining in 1926. In 1937, upon being appointed to the Supreme Court, Black said: "Before becoming a Senator I dropped the Klan. I have had nothing to do with it since that time. I abandoned it. I completely discontinued any association with the organization." Black served as the secretary of the Senate Democratic Conference and the chair of the Senate Education Committee during his decade in the Senate. Having gained a reputation in the Senate as a reformer, Black was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Roosevelt and confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 63 to 16 (six Democratic Senators and 10 Republican Senators voted against him). He was the first of nine Roosevelt appointees to the court, and he outlasted all except for William O. Douglas.
The fifth longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history, Black was one of the most influential Supreme Court justices in the 20th century. He is noted for using historical evidence to support textualist arguments, his position that the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights were imposed on the states ("incorporated") by the Fourteenth Amendment, and his absolutist stance on the First Amendment, often declaring "No law [abridging the freedom of speech] means no law." Black expanded individual rights in his opinions in cases such as Gideon v. Wainwright, Engel v. Vitale, and Wesberry v. Sanders.
Black's views were not uniformly liberal. During World War II, he wrote the majority opinion in Korematsu v. United States (1944), which upheld the internment of Japanese Americans ordered by the president Franklin Roosevelt. During the mid-1960s, Black became slightly more conservative. Black opposed the doctrine of substantive due process (the pre-1937 Supreme Court's interpretation of this concept made it impossible for the government to enact legislation that conservatives claimed interfered with the freedom of business owners), and believed that there was no basis in the words of the Constitution for a right to privacy, voting against finding one in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). He also took conservative positions in cases such as Shapiro v. Thompson, Goldberg v. Kelly, Tinker v. Des Moines, and Cohen v. California where he distinguished between "pure speech" and "expressive conduct".
Early years
Black was born in Harlan, Clay County, Alabama, on February 27, 1886, the youngest of eight children born to William Lafayette Black and Martha (Toland) Black. In 1890 the family moved to Ashland, the county seat. The family came from a Baptist background.
Black attended Ashland College, an academy located in Ashland, then enrolled at the University of Alabama School of Law. He graduated in 1906 with an LL.B. degree, was admitted to the bar, and began to practice in Ashland. In 1907, Black moved to the growing city of Birmingham, where he built a successful practice that specialized in labor law and personal injury cases.
As a consequence of his defense of an African American who was forced into a form of commercial slavery after incarceration, Black was befriended by A. O. Lane, a judge connected with the case. When Lane was elected to the Birmingham City Commission in 1911, he asked Black to serve as a police court judge – his only judicial experience prior to the Supreme Court. In 1912, Black resigned to return to practicing law full time. In 1914, he began a four-year term as the Jefferson County Prosecuting Attorney.
During World War I, Black resigned to join the United States Army. He served in the 81st Field Artillery, and attained the rank of captain as the regimental adjutant. When the regiment departed for France, its commander was ordered to return to Fort Sill to organize and train another regiment, and he requested Black as his adjutant. The war ended before Black's new unit departed the United States, and he returned to law practice. He joined the Birmingham Civitan Club during this time, eventually serving as president of the group. He remained an active member throughout his life, occasionally contributing articles to Civitan publications.
In the early 1920s, Black became a member of the Robert E. Lee Klan No. 1 in Birmingham, and he resigned in 1925. In 1937, after his confirmation to the Supreme Court, it was reported he had been given a "grand passport" in 1926, granting him life membership to the Ku Klux Klan. In response to this news, Black said he had never used the passport and had not kept it. He further stated that when he resigned he completely discontinued his Klan association, that he had never resumed it, and that he expected never to resume his membership.
On February 23, 1921, he married Josephine Foster, with whom he had three children: Hugo L. Black, II (1922–2013), an attorney; Sterling Foster (1924–1996), and Martha Josephine (1933-2019). Josephine died in 1951; in 1957, Black married Elizabeth Seay DeMeritte.
Senate career
In 1926, Black sought election to the United States Senate from Alabama, following the retirement of Senator Oscar Underwood. Since the Democratic Party had dominated Alabama politics since disenfranchising most blacks (and Republicans) at the turn of the century, Black easily defeated his Republican opponent, E. H. Dryer, winning 80.9% of the white vote. He was reelected in 1932, winning 86.3% of the vote against Republican J. Theodore Johnson. Senator Black gained a reputation as a tenacious investigator. In 1934, he chaired the committee that looked into the contracts awarded to air mail carriers under Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown, an inquiry which led to the Air Mail scandal. To correct what he termed abuses of "fraud and collusion" resulting from the Air Mail Act of 1930, he introduced the Black–McKellar Bill, later the Air Mail Act of 1934. The following year he participated in a Senate committee's investigation of lobbying practices. He publicly denounced the "highpowered, deceptive, telegram-fixing, letterframing, Washington-visiting" lobbyists, and advocated legislation requiring them to publicly register their names and salaries.
In 1935, during the Great Depression, Black became chairman of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, a position he would hold for the remainder of his Senate career. On August 8, 1935, Black, who was chairman of the senate committee investigating lobbying activities, went on NBC's National Radio Forum. The national audience was shocked to hear Black speak of a $5 million electric industry lobbying campaign attempt to defeat the Wheeler–Rayburn bill, known as the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 that had passed in July. The act directed the Securities and Exchange Commission to close down the country's corrupt electric holding companies. Black gave a dramatic speech on this four-decade-long political battle.
Critics of Black's lobbying committee in leading newspapers, such as the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, described his investigative methods as both "inquisitorial" and "terroristic" and charged that his goal was to intimidate and silence anti-New Dealers. Most controversially, Black, with the backing of the Roosevelt administration, sought to get FCC to order Western Union and other telegraph companies to provide access to copies to several million telegrams sent during the period of February 1 to September 1, 1935. Committee and FCC staffers examined the telegrams at the rate of several thousand per day. The committee's goal was to uncover content that had bearing on lobbying, which it defined very broadly to include just about any political commentary. People who had their private telegrams examined included every member of Congress as well as leaders of anti-New Deal organizations. When Black's investigation of these telegrams became public knowledge, there was a major outcry in the press. On March 11, 1936, Chief Justice Alfred A. Wheat of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia (later renamed the District Court of D.C.) granted an injunction prohibiting the committee from any further examination of more telegrams on the grounds that they secured though against unreasonable search and seizure.
In 1937 he sponsored the Black–Connery Bill, which sought to establish a national minimum wage and a maximum workweek of thirty hours. Although the bill was initially rejected in the House of Representatives, an amended version of it, which extended Black's original maximum workweek proposal to forty-four hours, was passed in 1938 (after Black left the Senate), becoming known as the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Black was an ardent supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. In particular, he was an outspoken advocate of the Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937, popularly known as the court-packing bill, FDR's unsuccessful plan to expand the number of seats on the Supreme Court.
Throughout his career as a senator, Black gave speeches based on his belief in the ultimate power of the Constitution. He came to see the actions of the anti-New Deal Supreme Court as judicial excess; in his view, the court was improperly overturning legislation that had been passed by large majorities in Congress.
During his Senate career, Black consistently opposed the passage of anti-lynching legislation, as did all of the white Democrats of the Solid South. In 1935 Black led a filibuster of the Wagner-Costigan anti-lynching bill. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported that when a motion to end the filibuster was defeated, "[t]he southerners-headed by Tom Connally of Texas and Hugo Black of Alabama—grinned at each other and shook hands."
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