By Jill Broderick

In 1954, a white professor of constitutional law, Charles L. Black, Jr., helped Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., write the legal brief for Linda Brown, a 10-year-old student in Topeka, Kansas, whose historic case, Brown v. Board of Education, decided May 17, 1954, became the Supreme Court’s definitive judgment on racial segregation in American education.

Charles Black was born September 22, 1915, in racist Austin, Texas, one of three children of a prominent lawyer. In 1931, as a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, he happened to hear Louis Armstrong play.

Black later wrote in the Yale Law Journal, “He was the first genius I had ever seen. … It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius, for the first time, in a black.  We literally never saw a black then in any but a servant’s capacity. … [I]t was just then that I started toward the Brown case, where I belonged. … Louis opened my eyes wide, and put me to a choice.  Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place.’  What was the ‘place’ of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?”

Jazz critic Nat Hentoff wrote in the article, “How Jazz Helped Hasten the Civil-Rights Movement,” in the January 15, 2009 issue of The Wall Street Journal, that Armstrong himself wrote in a September, 1941 letter: “I’d like to recall one of my most inspiring moments. I was playing a concert date in a Miami auditorium. I walked on stage and there I saw something I’d never seen. I saw thousands of people, colored and white, on the main floor. Not segregated in one row of whites and another row of Negroes. Just all together-naturally. I thought I was in the wrong state. When you see things like that, you know you’re going forward.

Black never lost his love for or appreciation of Louis Armstrong. On the day of Armstrong’s death in 1971, Black’s son wrote him a letter of condolence.

Following the Brown decision, Black continued to serve as a senior adviser to Thurgood Marshall. As a law professor, he taught generations of law students, first at Columbia from 1947 to 1956, then at Yale for 30 years, then again at Columbia from 1986 until his health began to fail prior to his death in 2001.

Black was the first Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale, and in 1975 he became the Sterling Professor of Law, the highest academic rank at Yale. He also wrote more than 20 books and many articles on constitutional law, admiralty law, capital punishment, the role of the judiciary and other legal subjects.

But it is his stirring rhetoric, the evidence of his passion for justice, which made Charles Black truly memorable.  In “The Lawfulness of The Segregation Decisions,” which appeared in The Yale Law Journal, he wrote:

“[I]f a whole race of people finds itself confined within a system which is set up and continued for the very purpose of keeping it in an inferior station, and if the question is then solemnly propounded whether such a race is being treated ‘equally,’ I think we ought to exercise one of the sovereign prerogatives of philosophers – that of laughter.”

He understood that it is unwritten law that had the most devastating effect in the South, because there was no legal resource against it. In the Yale Law Journal, Black also spoke up against so-called facially neutral laws, and the need to counteract their insidious effects:

“The society that has just lost the Negro as a slave, that has just lost out in an attempt to put him under quasi-servile ‘Codes,’ the society that views his blood as a contamination and his name as an insult, the society that extralegally imposes on him every humiliating mark of low caste and that … kept him in line by lynching – this society, careless of his consent, moves by law, first to exclude him from voting, and secondly to cut him off from mixing in the general public life of the community.  The Court that refused to see inequality in this cutting off would be making the only kind of law that can be warranted outrageous in advance – law based on self-induced blindness, on flagrant contradiction of known fact.”

Throughout his life, Professor Black endeavored through his work to ensure that the blindfold of justice did not obscure the discriminatory effect of laws and the need for greater protections for minorities.  He never stopped insisting that we live up to Abraham Lincoln’s plea from his October 16, 1854 speech at Peoria, to not only save the Union, but “to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.”