Hugo Black

Hugo Lafayette Black was born on February 27, 1886, and died on September 25, 1971, and served as a United States senator from Alabama from 1927 to 1937 and then as an associate justice of the Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971, the sixth longest tenure in the Courts history. A Democrat and devoted supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal, he was the first of nine Roosevelt appointees to the Court, and his early membership in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, which he said he abandoned upon his Senate election, dogged him after his nomination. He became known for using historical evidence to argue that the Bill of Rights should be incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, and for an absolutist reading of the First Amendment, famously declaring that no law abridging free speech means no law, expanding individual rights in cases such as Gideon v. Wainwright and Engel v. Vitale. His record was not uniformly liberal, however: he wrote the Courts 1944 majority opinion in Korematsu v. United States upholding the internment of Japanese Americans, and he later opposed finding an unenumerated constitutional right to privacy, dissenting in Griswold v. Connecticut.