Hugo Black

Clay County in the Alabama foothills produced him, the youngest of eight in a Baptist family that moved to the county seat when he was four. He went to an academy in Ashland, then to the University of Alabama law school, and had his license at 20. Birmingham was where the work was — labor law and injury cases — and defending a Black man forced into convict leasing won him the friendship of a judge and, in 1911, a seat on the police court. That was the whole of his judicial experience before the Supreme Court. He prosecuted for Jefferson County, made captain in the field artillery without reaching France, married Josephine Foster in 1921, and in the early 1920s joined the Robert E. Lee Klan No. 1.

Alabama sent him to the Senate in 1926. He ran investigations that blew up the airmail contracts and hauled in millions of utility-industry telegrams, and the wage-and-hour bill he wrote with William Connery became, amended, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. By then Roosevelt had put him on the Supreme Court, where he stayed 34 years. He read the First Amendment as an instruction rather than a suggestion — no law meant no law — and wrote Engel v. Vitale off state-sponsored school prayer and Gideon v. Wainwright to give poor defendants a lawyer. Everson applied the establishment clause to the states. Wesberry made congressional districts equal in population. His dissent in Adamson, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment carried the whole Bill of Rights against the states, never won a majority and won most of the country anyway.

The Senate confirmed him before it knew what it had. Ray Sprigle of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette then published the Klan record and took a Pulitzer for it, including a grand passport issued in 1926 that made Black a life member. Black went on the radio on October 1, 1937, told a national audience he had dropped the Klan and had nothing to do with it since, and never gave a fuller accounting. His biographer Roger Newman counts more than 100 anti-Catholic speeches Black delivered to Klan meetings during that Senate campaign. In 1935 he led a filibuster against a federal anti-lynching bill. In 1944 he wrote Korematsu, which upheld the removal and detention of Japanese Americans. The absolutist on speech also dissented when schoolchildren wore black armbands.

He checked himself into the naval hospital at Bethesda in August 1971, retired on September 17, had a stroke two days later, and died on September 25. He asked that his coffin be simple and cheap and be shown at the National Cathedral service, on the principle that a burial's cost says nothing about the person inside it. Arlington took him. What he argued in dissent about the Bill of Rights binding the states is now most of American law, and justices as unlike as Earl Warren and Antonin Scalia drew on his method. Korematsu is the other side of the ledger. Alabama named a federal courthouse for him in 1987 and raised a monument in Ashland in 2022.

Hugo Black's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Fair Labor Standards Act law
  His Black-Connery wage and hour bill, passed in amended form 1938
• Korematsu v. United States case
  He wrote the opinion upholding the wartime detention of Japanese Americans 1944
• Adamson v. California, dissenting case
  The argument that the Fourteenth Amendment binds states to the entire Bill of Rights 1947
• Everson v. Board of Education case
  Applied the establishment clause to the states 1947
• Engel v. Vitale case
  Ended state-sponsored prayer in public schools 1962
• Gideon v. Wainwright case
  Required states to provide counsel to defendants who cannot pay 1963

• February 27, 1886 aged 0 Born at Harlan in Clay County, the youngest of eight
• 1906 aged ~20 Takes a law degree at the University of Alabama at 20
• 1911 aged ~25 Appointed a Birmingham police court judge His only time on a bench before the Supreme Court.
• Early 1920s aged ~37 Joins the Robert E. Lee Klan No. 1 in Birmingham He resigned in 1925 to run for the Senate and quietly rejoined the next year.
• 1926 aged ~40 Elected to the United States Senate
• August 17, 1937 aged 51 Confirmed to the Supreme Court, 63 to 16 The Klan record broke in the press days later.
• October 1, 1937 aged 51 Answers the Klan revelations in a national radio address He said he had abandoned the organization and would not return to it.
• 1962 aged ~76 Writes Engel v. Vitale, ending official prayer in public schools
• September 17, 1971 aged 85 Retires from the Court after 34 years He had a stroke two days later.
• September 25, 1971 aged 85 Dies at Bethesda

• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. appointed by
• Roger Williams 1603–1683
  Founder of Rhode Island and early advocate of religious liberty and separation of church and state. cited him from the bench
• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. took the wall of separation from
• Antonin Scalia 1936–2016
  Justice whose advocacy of originalism and textualism transformed American legal interpretation. inherited his textualism
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. dissented from the sit-in reversals