BLACK, HUGO (LA FAYETTE)

born Feb. 27, 1886, Clay county, Ala., U.S. died Sept. 25, 1971, Bethesda, Md. lawyer, politician, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (193771), best known for his absolutist belief in the Bill of Rights as a guarantee of civil liberties. Perhaps his most important contribution to the American judicial tradition was his insistence that the Fourteenth Amendment made the Bill of Rightsoriginally adopted to limit the power of the national governmentequally restrictive on the power of the states to curtail individual freedom. During his first 40 years, Hugo Black's career was confined almost exclusively to his native Alabama. He attended law school at the state university at Tuscaloosa, and, after graduating and passing the bar in 1906, he practiced law in Birmingham. It was not until 1926 that Black became a figure of national prominence. He was elected that year as a Democrat to a seat in the U.S. Senate, where he served until 1937. There he won considerable acclaim for his investigation of utility lobbyists. But, perhaps more importantly, he earned the gratitude of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his unwavering support of New Deal legislation. Roosevelt appointed Black to the Supreme Court in 1937. In the early part of his tenure, Black acted with a growing court majority in its reversal of previous court vetoes of New Deal legislation. Black combined this tolerance for increased federal powers of economic regulation with an activist stance on civil liberties. In the 1940s and '50s he frequently dissented from the court's majority in his absolutist position on freedom of speech, and he denounced governmental restrictions on liberties as unconstitutional and dangerous. During the 1960s Black held a prominent position among the liberal majority on the court who struck down mandatory school prayer and who guaranteed the availability of legal counsel to suspected criminals. His last major opinion supported the right of The New York Times to publish the so-called Pentagon Papers in 1971 in the face of government attempts to restrict their publication.