Hugo Lafayette BLACK, Congress, AL (1886-1971)

BLACK Hugo Lafayette , a Senator from Alabama; born near Ashland, Clay County, Ala., February 27, 1886; attended the public schools and Ashland College, Ashland, Ala.; graduated from the law department of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa in 1906; admitted to the Alabama bar the same year and commenced practice in Ashland, Ala.; moved to Birmingham, Ala., in 1907 and continued the practice of law; during the First World War served as a captain of the Eighty-first Field Artillery and as company regimental adjutant in the Nineteenth Artillery Brigade 1917-1918; police court judge in Birmingham, Ala.; prosecuting attorney of Jefferson County, Ala.; elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1926; reelected in 1932 and served from March 4, 1927, until his resignation on August 19, 1937, having been appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court; chairman, Committee on Education and Labor (Seventy-fourth and Seventy-fifth Congresses); was confirmed by the Senate on August 17, 1937, took his seat as an Associate Justice on October 4, 1937 and served until his resignation on September 17, 1971, just days before his death in Bethesda, Md., on September 25, 1971; interment in Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Va.

Bibliography

American National Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law; Suitts, Steve. Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution. Montgomery: New South Books, 2005; Ball, Howard. Hugo L. Black: Cold Steel Warrior. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Source: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1771-Present