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"Born Witch Burner." A zealous New Dealer who was born on his father's farm in Clay County, Ala., Hugo Black managed to earn a law degree at the University of Alabama without ever going to college, then became a Birmingham police-court judge and a crack negligence lawyer. In 1926, his Populist fervor persuaded Alabamians to elect him to the U.S. Senate. Aware of his spotty schooling, he spent his first term buried in the Library of Congress reading Aquinas, Aristotle, Herodotus, Locke, Marx, Mill, Montesquieu, Plutarch, Tacitus, Spinoza, Thucydides, Shakespeare, the records of the Constitutional Convention, and all of Thomas Jefferson.
Armed with that formidable self-education, Black emerged in his second term as one of the Senate's most ardent Roosevelt supporters, a relentless, high-handed (and hardly judicious) investigator of public-utility lobbies, a prime mover of TVA, and a thundering critic of "judicial usurpation" by a Supreme Court that was overruling one piece of New Deal legislation after another. When F.D.R. failed in his plan to pack the Court with pro-New Dealers in 1937, he did the next best thing: he named Senator Black to fill the vacancy left by retiring Justice Willis Van Devanter. It was a well-planned ploy: the Senate could hardly refuse to confirm one of its own.
But appointing Supreme Court Justices for political reasons is dubious business. Teddy Roosevelt thought he had a dutiful trustbuster in Holmes. Then Holmes handed down his first important dissent in favor of a big corporation, inciting T. R. to snarl that the new Justice had less backbone than a banana. The early fruits of Black's appointment were equally bitter. Choleric ex-NRA Administrator Hugh Johnson denounced him as "a born witch burner —narrow, prejudiced, class-conscious." Not only did the New York Herald Tribune storm that he had "not the slightest qualification," but newsmen soon discovered that he had once been a Ku Klux Klansman. Black took to the radio to announce that he had indeed been a Klansman for a short time, added that he was not a bigot, and insisted that he would say no more about it.
A Switch in Time. Black responded so magnificently to his new job that today he is no more welcome in racist Alabama than he would ever have been in fiery Salem. The Court responded so adroitly to F.D.R.'s packing threat that it began upholding New Deal legislation in a turnabout that cynics called "a switch in time that saved nine." Ever since, its judicial concern has been focused not so much on property rights as on human rights.
When Mr. Justice Black took his seat in 1937 at the age of 51, he had a New Dealer's faith in the goodness of Government power. Backing up F.D.R. in World War II, he wrote the Court's 1944 opinion upholding the wholesale relocation of West Coast Japanese-Americans (actively supported in 1942 by California's then attorney general, Earl Warren) over Justice Frank Murphy's eloquent dissent that called the ruling "the ugly abyss of racism." By 1952, Black had swung so far around to a concept of limited Government that he wrote