Hugo Black, Jr.

Who was Hugo Black, Jr.?

Hugo Lafayette Black II was an American attorney and legal author.

Black was born in 1922 in Birmingham, Alabama to future U.S. Senator from Alabama and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Hugo Lafayette Black and Josephine Foster. He was married to Bessie Graham Hobson and they had three children, Elizabeth, Margaret and Hugo Black III.

After the younger Black graduated from high school, he went to the University of Alabama until he was drafted into the Army and stayed stateside during World War II. He then went back to the University of Alabama and in 1946 graduated with an A.B. in English. Then in 1949, he received an LL.B. from Yale University, where he was a member of the Board of Editors of the Yale Law Journal and president of Yale Law School Student Association and graduated second in his class. He was admitted to practice law in the states of Alabama and Florida, as well as several Federal District Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court of the United States.

After graduating from Yale Law, he returned to Birmingham where he began a labor law practice. In 1952, Black considered following in his father’s footsteps by entering politics. “I definitely had politics in mind,” he wrote in his book about his father. That year, his father told him to come to Washington, D.C. and warned him that if he was elected to Congress he would be under constant political attack at home because the high court would soon have some important decisions dealing with school segregation, according to Justice Black biographer Roger Newman. As a result, the younger Black decided not to run and stayed in Alabama. After the 1954 unanimous landmark U.S. Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education decision that desegregated public schools and being the son of the Supreme Court Justice Black, the younger Black received threats from people who said they would burn crosses in his yard, his young son was taunted at school, and by the early 1960s — saying he had had enough — the younger Black moved his young family to what is now Pinecrest Florida.