Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution

By Steve Suitts, New South Books, 556 pages, $37.50

"You that would judge me do not judge alone," the Irish poet Yeats wrote. "And say my glory was I had such friends."

Review by Glynn Wilson

We should all be so fortunate to know a friend like Hugo Black.

One of the prime directives of American journalism is to expose myths and destroy false prophets. But every once in awhile, part of the mission is also to elevate heroes to the pedestal of human aspirations.

Hugo L. Black

Even with his inevitable flaws and warts, any child of Alabama or America for that matter would do well to study the life and work of Hugo Black. This is an especially fine time to reflect on Black, living as we are in an era when his main works are undergoing an all out assault by the political right.

What is it about Alabama that stirs up in its citizens such revolutions and counter revolutions in America politics and law? Perhaps it is something about the difficult struggle to survive in a land of monumental contradictions that drives men like Hugo Black and now Judge Roy Moore to try creating a better reality as they see it based on their studies and experiences.

If the author of the latest biography of Hugo Black has accomplished his assessment correctly, friendships defined the man. Friendships were responsible for his rise from a farmer's son in rural Clay County to the Birmingham bar, then to the U.S. Senate and ultimately the Supreme Court, where his lasting legacy to his country involved elevating the Constitution - especially the First Amendment - into the consciousness of every American citizen.

"Throughout his life, Hugo Black prized friendship as far more than a set of personal, pleasing relationships," Suitts writes. "Friendship defined much of his own identity."

Maybe, but in this limited but valuable contribution to the literature on Black, which effectively ends with his election to the Senate in 1926 and does not deal with his time in Washington, another theme is pushed aside. It was not just friendships that defined Black. It was a powerful sense of courage in the fight for justice under the law and his desire to help create a progressive country out of one of the most regressive periods in its history.

"Wealth and power tempted people to corrupt democracy, citizenship and friendship," Black believed. And so that is what he fought against all his life.

One of the great senators and Supreme Court justices in U.S. history, Black was buried in a plane pine casket, according to another Black biographer, Roger Newman, whose telling is a bit more artful and certainly a more complete portrait.

While there are some flairs of fine writing in Suitt's book, mainly the preamble, the chapter on Black's election to the Senate and the benediction, some of it is hard to wade through. The most glaring flaws in Suitts' book are some unnecessary tangents that could have been edited down and the over reliance on trial transcripts for dialogue. The detailed discussions of the convict-lease system were interesting for a son of Birmingham, Alabama, but perhaps not so crucial for anyone else in the country and not so critical for defining Hugo Black the man.

Clearly one of the most influential institutions that shaped Hugo Black was his life-long membership in the Baptist church, founded in America in 1639 by Englishman Roger Williams. This will come as the biggest surprise to readers today, including newspaper editors from Birmingham to New York.

It was the Baptist principles of religious freedom and the separation of church and state that led Black to write some of his most important decisions on the Supreme Court, decisions that still incite hatred of Black by today's Southern Baptists, who have clearly forgotten their roots and are totally ensconced in the fight to tear down the wall between church and state.

It is too bad this theme was not explored more for what it could do to inform the modern debate. It was Black who in 1962 wrote the language in Engel v. Vitale that is a large part of the law of our land today on the issue of school prayer.

"The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state," Black wrote. "That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach."

Clearly, that wall today is not only breached, it is on the verge of being over topped like the levees in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. One can only hope the flood of religious violence in America and the world will not swamp our entire country like the flood waters of Lake Pontchartrain swamped the lower Ninth Ward.

Black is also largely responsible for many of the decisions we are fortunate to live under today on the issues of freedom of speech and of the press, and civil rights. It was the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which found seperate black and white schools inherently and illegally unequal, that estranged Black from his native state for the next 16 years. He only returned for a surprise reunion in 1970, the year before his death.

"I had some fine friends . . . who remained my friends throughout their lives," Black said to a mostly admiring audience at the Parliament House on Birmingham's 20th Street.

But of course it was friendship, in part, that led Black to defend his friend and fellow member of the Ku Klux Klan, Chum Smelley, in his final case as a defense attorney in Alabama in 1927. Smelley, who had helped drive Black around the state in his run for the Senate in 1926, gunned down a black handyman outside the Talladega courthouse after the man was found not guilty of killing Smelley's father in a drunken mystery trip a couple of years earlier.

Black used friendship as his excuse in what Suitts says was the one thing that "burdened Black's conscience for the reminder (sic) of his years."

"It was inexcusable," Black reportedly admitted to his son Hugo Jr. years later. "But Chum was my friend . . . I had to help him."

If I were tasked with writing Black's story, I would not be as kind on the issue of prohibition, which also defined Black's early years and came out of his religious faith. Chalk it up to an alcoholic father, but Black's fervent drive to ban the consumption of alcohol was a flaw - in my eyes anyway. Luckily, Franklin Roosevelt, the president who valued Black's effectiveness in the Senate enough to appoint him to the Supreme Court, led the fight to repeal prohibition in 1933.

By then Black had far bigger battles to fight for the working people of America against corrupt corporations. The conservatives of today hate him for this too, but Black's authorship of the Fair Labor Standards Act and the first minimum wage law in the U.S. did much to lift the poor people of the South out of abject poverty during the Great Depression.

Now if only we could find similar champions of the poor in Congress and on the Supreme Court today. That has little chance of happening in these times, unless the public can be educated about the contradictions between their own plight and their voting patterns.

At the very least, college professors and school teachers in Alabama would do well to erect some kind of memorial to Hugo Black beyond the federal courthouse, a memorial that would educate the students of Alabama about the pillars of his legacy - before the reactionary, conservative forces destroy it forever.

It will take someone with Black's courage to stand up to these new forces. It would not be a bad thing to aspire to for any son of the South to live by these parting words.

"What more can be asked than for a man to have courage, express his views, and be ready to announce them without fear whichever side they happen to fall down on."

Where is that kind of courage to be found today?

The New York Times used to live by a similar slogan: "Without fear or favor." The Times never really understood Black - even though he helped save that great newspaper on several occassions.

As sad as it sounds, for that kind of courage today you have to turn NOT to America's politicians, judges or newspapers. Maybe the blogs and bloggers can fill some of the void.

Hugo Black.Com