A poet, musician, and Greek classicist who taught law for 52 years. A privileged son of the South who helped to destroy segregation throughout the land. A constitutional legal authority who thought that Richard Nixon should not surrender his Watergate tapes to the House judiciary committee.

Charles L. Black, Jr., was always an independent thinker, impossible to pigeon-hole, as passionate about ballet as he was about admiralty law.

But long before he was a distinguished law professor at Columbia and Yale, he was a 16-year-old University of Texas freshman who heard Louis Armstrong play jazz one evening at the Driskill Hotel in downtown Austin. And that experience changed his life.

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