Charles L. Black, Jr.:
Lawyer, Poet, Jazz Aficionado
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It's not often that you meet someone who publishes volumes of poetry, or volumes on constitutional law, much less someone who did both and helped an African-American girl named Linda Brown go to school in Topeka, Kansas, in 1954. History has yet to determine Charles L. Black's greatest accomplishment--writing the definitive work on impeachment or working with Thurgood Marshall on the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education. Or perhaps it was his compassionate study of capital punishment. One thing is certain: whenever historians and law scholars discuss the major legal issues of twentieth-century America, they will include the name Charles L. Black, Jr., a 1935 graduate of The University of Texas who left his footprints on the legal landscape of his times. Born in Austin, Texas, in 1915, the son of a renowned Austin lawyer, Charles Black graduated from Austin High School at age 16 and studied classics at The University of Texas. He earned a master's degree in English from UT in 1938 and then studied Old and Middle English at Yale before receiving his Yale law degree in 1943. After a short stint in the Army Air Corps and practicing law with a private firm, Black took up teaching, lecturing students at Yale and Columbia on constitutional law from 1947 until 1999. Hillary Rodham Clinton was one of his students, as were numerous future leaders in government, business, and academia. Black won many academic honors and was named the Sterling Professor of Law, a distinguished professorship at the Yale law school. He was admired for his lucid law lectures referencing philosophers, artists, and Japanese gods, all delivered in a Texas drawl. That drawl was surprising to some, who knew Black for his work in the civil rights movement. Given his background and the racism that dominated the South during that period, the casual observer may have assumed that Black was pro-segregation. But Charles Black was a fierce defender of equality and helped write the legal brief for Linda Brown, the little girl whose court case put an end to the idea of "separate but equal" in the United States. Black's commitment to the civil rights movement came out of his passionate love of jazz. He was 16 years old and a freshman at The University of Texas when he heard jazz legend Louis Armstrong play at Austin's Driskill Hotel in 1931. It was an era of racial segregation in Texas, and Black had grown up believing that "Blacks were all right in their place," as he later recalled. But facing the magnificence of Armstrong's playing, Black wondered, "What was the 'place' of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?" On several occasions, Charles Black explained that hearing Louis Armstrong play music that evening in 1931 had forever changed the way he thought about race and racial issues. 
Black fought capital punishment almost as adamantly as he fought segregation, publishing the book Capital Punishment: the Inevitability of Caprice and Mistake (Norton) in 1974. But his most highly acclaimed book was Impeachment: A Handbook (Yale University Press, 1974), published during the Watergate hearings while President Richard Nixon was facing impeachment. The book was reissued in 1999, when President Bill Clinton was being impeached, and brought Black back into the spotlight. An academic book rather than a political one, Impeachment offered no opinion on the presidents under fire but rather analyzed impeachment law and history. (However, Black was vehemently opposed to forcing Nixon to surrender his audio tapes because he feared that executive privilege would be weakened and might upset the balance of power in the government.) Black's law interests were wide-ranging. In addition to his impeachment and capital punishment books, he also wrote extensively on admiralty law, including the definitive admiralty text, The Law of Admiralty, co-authored with Grant Gilmore (Foundation Press, 1957), and 17 other legal books and hundreds of articles. Black was widely praised for his clear, powerful prose. He published three volumes of poetry--Telescopes and Islands, Owls Bay in Babylon, and The Waking Passenger. Black's artistic inclinations were nearly as broad as his legal expertise. He painted, he played the trumpet and harmonica, he loved ballet, and he was a lifelong jazz aficionado. In fact, it was Black's love of jazz, as well as his civil rights work, that captured filmmaker Ken Burns's attention. Burns invited Charles Black to tell the Louis Armstrong anecdote in an episode of the multi-part PBS documentary, Jazz. In the end, despite all the academic and professional accolades, perhaps Charles Black's greatest influence was not on constitutional or admiralty law, but on young lawyers. When he retired from teaching at Yale, the entire law school student body serenaded him with The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The Yale Law Journal devoted its July 1986 issue to him. And Akhil Amar, a Yale professor who had taken many of Black's classes, said: "He was my hero. He made so many of the great moral issues of the twentieth century seem clear in retrospect, although they were quite controversial at the time. He had the moral courage to go against his race, class, and social circle." Charles L. Black, Jr., died on May 5, 2001 at the age of 85. He is survived by his wife, law professor Barbara Aronstein Black, and their three children. By Moira Muldoon
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