Hugo L. Black

He remains one of the First Amendment’s greatest champions.

Hugo Black, raised in Clay County and a 1906 graduate of the University of Alabama School of Law, practiced law in Birmingham, often representing industrial workers and striking miners. He vowed to win election to the U.S. Senate by age forty, and he did so in 1926. He served as President Franklin Roosevelt’s top lieutenant in the Senate, tirelessly arguing on behalf of New Deal legislation and programs.

He was Roosevelt’s first appointment to the Supreme Court and served for thirty-four years, twenty-six of them as senior justice. His deeply held and cherished beliefs about free speech, individual liberties, racial equality, and trial by jury led him to cast countless votes and write numerous opinions that made him a political pariah in his home state. Never yielding to social pressures, this very Southern justice, whose written opinions often borrowed lines from his favorite hymns, never hesitated to call segregated schools unconstitutional and wrong.

Black demonstrated a great love for the Constitution, and carried a dog-eared copy of it with him so he could quote from it liberally. For Black, nothing would substitute for a literal reading of the revered document. But there was one thing he loved almost as much as the Constitution — a vigorous and spirited game of tennis. He could be found on “the other court” almost daily until his death in 1971 at age 85.

“The American Constitution,” he wrote, “is no accident of history, but it is the evolutionary product of man’s striving throughout past ages to protect himself from tyrannical kings, potentates, and rulers. . . .” “A written constitution was chosen . . . because this was the best way to protect minority rights from the tyranny of the majority.”

In Alabama, liberal democracy has always been a frail creature. Perhaps because of that frailty, Alabama has produced some of its greatest champions, many of whom are represented in the College of Communication and Information Sciences Hall of Fame. If anything, Hugo Black is parent to them all. It is fitting that his countenance will now grace the rotunda of the University’s Old Union Building, Reese Phifer Hall.