Black, Hugo (1886–1971), associate justice of the U.S.
Supreme Court (1937–1971).A police court judge and attorney in his native Alabama, Black served as a U.S. senator from 1925 to 1937, strongly supporting President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's New Deal. For this loyalty, Roosevelt selected Black as his first Supreme Court nominee in 1937.
Black's appointment was marred by reports that he had belonged to the
Ku Klux Klan. While admitting past Klan involvement, Black repudiated the Klan's
racism and religious bigotry. Known as one of the Court's greatest civil libertarians, Black participated in the unanimous desegregation ruling,
Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Yet he also wrote—and never renounced—the majority opinion in
Korematsu v. United States (1944), which sustained the federal government's forcible relocation of Japanese Americans during
World War II on grounds of national security.
Black contended that judges should strictly follow the original intention behind the Constitution's provisions. Most strikingly, Black concluded that the First Amendment protects virtually all forms of speech and press, including obscenity, libel, and seditious utterances, which must be protected from government
censorship. This constitutional absolutism was rooted in his affinity for Populism, the nineteenth‐century agrarian movement (especially strong in Alabama) that emphasized the need to combat government's tendency to serve powerful interests at the expense of the less fortunate.
See also
Bill of Rights;
Civil Liberties;
Incarceration of Japanese Americans;
New Deal Era, The;
Populist Era;
Sedition.
Bibliography
Hugo L. Black , A Constitutional Faith, 1968.
Jeffrey D. Hockett , New Deal Justice: The Constitutional Jurisprudence of Hugo L. Black, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert H. Jackson, 1996.
Jeffrey D. Hockett
