Hugo Lafayette Black was an American politician who served as a Democratic United States Senator and represented Alabama in the Senate from 1927 to 1937, and served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1937 to 1971. Black was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 63 to 16 (6 Democratic Senators and 10 Republican Senators voted against him.)
Background
Hugo Lafayette Black was born in rural Clay County, Alabama, on February 27, 1886, the eighth child of William Lafayette Black and Martha Ardella Toland Black. His father made a living as a farmer and a country storekeeper until the family moved, when Hugo was three years old, to the bustling metropolis of Ash-land—population 350—where the elder Black opened a general store. Opposite the courthouse square, the store placed young Hugo Black in close proximity to open-air political speeches and lawyers arguing their cases before juries in the courthouse.
Education
These early rhetorical influences would eventually draw Hugo into the worlds of politics and law, although at age 17 he briefly embarked on training for a medical career. After a year at the Birmingham Medical School, though, he turned instead to the study of law and attended law school at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
Career
By age 20 Black had graduated with honors from law school and had set up law practice in his hometown of Ashland. But fire destroyed his office and everything in it a year later, and he seized the occasion to strike out for more fertile opportunities in Birmingham, Alabama. There he set up a new practice, joined and was soon elected president of every civic group that would have him, and taught a popular Sunday School class at the First Baptist Church of Birmingham. When not engaged in these activities, Black proved to be an able attorney, representing unions and working-class citizens and undertaking a number of personal injury cases. He also included among his responsibilities part-time service as a police court judge. By 1914 he had managed to win office as county prosecutor, a position he would hold until he joined the military in 1917 to serve in World War I, although he was never called on to leave the United States.
Upon his return to private life, Black continued his law practice. In 1921 he married Josephine Foster, a union that would last until her death 30 years later. In 1923 he formed a less auspicious association—one that cast a long and unsavory shadow across an otherwise exemplary career—by joining the Ku Klux Klan. He withdrew from the organization within two years, on the eve of announcing his intent to seek election as a U.S. senator from Alabama. Emphasizing his own roots in relative poverty, Black earned the Democratic nomination as the poor man’s candidate and was thereafter elected to the Senate in 1927.
During his first term as a senator, Black secured a basement room in the Capitol for study and regularly obtained books from the Library of Congress to supplement the education he had slighted in Alabama. His second term coincided with die election of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Black soon caught Roosevelt’s attention by showing himself to be a New' Deal liberal of the first order. He sponsored legislation that would become the Fair Labor Standards Act, and he supported Roosevelt’s court-packing threat in the face of a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that had frustrated Roosevelt’s New' Deal legislative agenda by declaring its key elements unconstitutional. Black’s har-mony with Roosevelt’s aims ultimately secured him a nomination to the first vacancy on the Supreme Court after the president took office. On August 17, 1937, at the age of 51, the Alabaman was confirmed by the Senate as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The news media shortly discovered his former association with the Ku Klux Klan, requiring Black to begin his service on the Supreme Court with a radio address admitting his brief membership in the organization, calling attention to his withdrawal from it, and declining to comment further about the matter.
Politics
Black adopted a similar stance concerning the issue of what provisions of the Bill of Rights were applicable to state and local laws, an issue often referred to as the incorporation controversy. By their terms the provisions of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution protect certain liberties from federal intrusions. The Fourteenth Amendment, though, prevents state and local governments from depriving individuals of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Beginning in the 1940s, the Supreme Court considered whether this clause might be understood to make some or all of the provisions of the Bill of Rights applicable to state and local governments. In other words, did the Fourteenth Amendment incorporate the provisions of the Bill of Rights in its protection of “life, liberty, and property”? On this issue, Justice Black’s position was a model of simplicity: The Fourteenth Amendment made every provision of die Bill of Rights applicable to state and local governments. Thus, for example, under his view the First Amendment’s protection against federal laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion applied with equal force to state and local laws. Nevertheless, although a majority of the Supreme Court agreed with Black on this result, he was never able to convince his brethren to adopt his broader principle. Most of the justices on the Supreme Court were selective in their designation of which rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights were sufficiently fundamental to warrant application to state and local laws. But, in part through Black’s constant prodding, die Court eventually determined that most of the provisions in the Bill of Rights were indeed applicable to both federal and state laws.