Hugo Black of Alabama
Three decades after his death, the life and career of Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black continue to be studied and discussed.
Hugo Black of Alabama, the definitive study of Black’s origins and early influences, has been 25 years in the making and offers fresh insights into the justice’s character, thought processes, and instincts. Black came out of hardscrabble Alabama hill country, and he never forgot his origins. He was further shaped in the early 20th-century politics of Birmingham, where he set up a law practice and began his political career, eventually rising to the U.S. Senate, from which he was selected by FDR for the high court. Black’s nomination was opposed partly on the grounds that he had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
One of the book’s conclusions that is sure to be controversial is that in the context of Birmingham in the early 1920s, Black’s joining of the KKK was a progressive act. This startling assertion is supported by an examination of the conflict that was then raging in Birmingham between the Big Mule industrialists and the blue-collar labor unions. Black of course went on to become a staunch judicial advocate of free speech and civil rights, thus making him one of the figures most vilified by the KKK and other white supremacists in the 1950s and 1960s.
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Published in 2017.
Author Q and A
1. What’s an early experience that help shaped Black’s views?
Growing up in Clay County, Alabama in the 1890s, Hugo Black heard old populists often argue for “equal rights for all, special privileges to none.” But it really hit home for Black only after Black moved to Birmingham and a deacon of the First Baptist Church (which he attended) recruited him to represent striking miners and their families who were being evicted from their homes. Representing the women and children of miners who were being thrown out of their homes simply because the miners were on strike was Black’s baptism in the ways of industrial relations in a company town in the Deep South and in how system of laws worked.
2. Black is a bundle of contradictions. Which contradiction matters most to understanding him – and how do you interpret it?
Actually, Black‘s life is more of a set of conundrums than contradictions. But perhaps the most striking contradiction is the fact that one of the great liberal justices of the United States Supreme Court, who helped assure that racial segregation was outlawed in America, was in Birmingham, Alabama, a member of the Ku Klux Klan only 15 years before he joined the Court.
To understand this contradiction, a reader must understand Alabama and Birmingham – and their political and economic conflicts of the early 1920s. I spend an entire chapter on why Hugo Black joined the Kluxers and the circumstances that led him to do so. Simply put, in the context of political and economic conflicts in Birmingham and Alabama in the early 1920s, Black’s decision to join the Klan was surely morally hazardous but comparatively a progressive choice for someone who was determined to be involved in shaping the law and the politics of is segregated community. Read the chapter.
3. What’s one Hugo Black idea about rights, the constitution, or the court that feels urgent now?
Black’s understanding of birthright citizenship speaks to the moment. The Trump administration is attempting to overturn the long-held view that the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction. After studying the words and history of the 14th Amendment, Black decided in a case involving a person of Japanese ancestry: “The Fourteenth Amendment declares that ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.’ Nishikawa was born in this country while subject to its jurisdiction; therefore American citizenship is his constitutional birthright.”


4. What would Black make of the John Roberts’ Supreme Court?
Justice Black was an originalist in his interpretation of the Constitution. Today, most members of the US Supreme Court identify as originalists, although Chief Justice Roberts is not one of them. He is more of a traditionalist who is often governed by precedent – the Court’s past decisions more than by the words, history, and structure of the Constitution itself. That said, Black’s originalist understanding of the Constitution would not put him in agreement with the current Court’s opinions in many cases, especially in regard to the First Amendment, campaign financing, voting rights, and equal protection of the law.
5. What was your process for writing this book?
It took me decades to research and write this book because I had full-time jobs at the Southern Regional Council and the Southern Education Foundation. I had to do a great deal of original research in archives and to go through the voluminous papers that Justice Black left in the Library of Congress — not to mention conducting dozens of interviews across the country. Also, I began the work on a Black Biography in the mid-1970s as a research assistant to civil rights attorney Charles “Chuck” Morgan, who intended to write a quick biography of Black. Therefore, I had the advantage of Chuck’s prior interviews, which proved invaluable, and his conversations about Black.
Although there had been several biographical articles and biographies written on Black, very little of his life and times in Alabama had been deeply researched before I began my book. That added to the process and workload for finishing the book.