(HOST) West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd died recently at the age of 92. Byrd was the longest-serving Senator in U.S. history, and it’s well known that he was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan. VPR commentator and Vermont Humanities Council executive director Peter Gilbert tells us about another hugely influential person who was also a member of the Klan.
(GILBERT) Hugo LaFayette Black represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate from 1927 to 1937. President Franklin Roosevelt then nominated him to the Supreme Court, where he served from 1937 to 1971 — not so long ago. He was the fifth longest-serving justice in our history and one of the most influential justices of the twentieth century.
Hugo Black was born in 1886 in a small wooden farmhouse in the hills of Clay County, Alabama, the youngest of eight children. He joined the Klan in 1923, when he was a young trial lawyer in Birmingham. He did so to ingratiate himself with the Klan-dominated juries of the time and to win Klan members’ votes when he ran for the Senate. Hugo Black’s 35 years on the Supreme Court reflected his on-going effort to rectify that egregious error.
Three years after joining the Court, Black wrote one of his most memorable opinions, Chambers v. Florida, which overturned, as a violation of due process of law, the convictions of four poor black tenant farmers who, without counsel and after nine days and nights of relentless police questioning, had confessed to a murder. Former Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and former Dartmouth College President James O. Freedman wrote that, "In a single, ringing sentence, Justice Black reproached and redeemed his past: ‘Under our Constitutional system, [Black wrote,] courts stand against any winds that blow as havens of refuge for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, outnumbered, or because they are non-conforming victims of prejudice and public excitement.’"
Hugo Black had little formal education, and yet over a lifetime of study and reflection, he pursued a course of self-education that, Freedman argued, was probably unprecedented in the Court’s history. He read political philosophy and history — from classical authors to the Enlightenment and our Founding Fathers – and in the process he grew, and he evolved a judicial philosophy that was hugely influential on the development of American Constitutional law.
For those reasons Justice Black was a kind of personal hero for Freedman. At the beginning of one academic year, Freedman held Black up to students as an examplar, because Black represented for him humans’ capacity for lifelong growth and development, and because Black transcended his narrow and prejudiced time and place to pursue his own, original path, and to serve a judicial philosophy that was not ideologically but conceptually defined.
Some years ago a President stated with what I considered misplaced pride his confidence that the opinions or thinking of his nominee to the Court wouldn’t "evolve" over time. As the Senate now considers a new nominee to the Court, we may do well to remember that in the face of experience and reflection both Senator Byrd and Justice Hugo Black changed, they grew, and their thinking evolved. And they and the country are the better for it.