The papers of Hugo LaFayette Black (1886-1971) span the years 1883 to 1976, with the bulk of the material beginning in 1926, the year of Black's successful campaign for the United States Senate. They relate to nearly every phase of Black's life, but are especially comprehensive for his tenure on the Supreme Court and for information about Alabama and New Deal politics between 1926 and 1937. Included are ten series: Family Papers, General Correspondence, Special Correspondence, Senatorial File, Supreme Court File, Speeches and Writings File, Miscellany, Oversize, Restricted Material, and an Addition.

The early years of Black's life are best documented in the family correspondence and in a scrapbook of his first appointed office as police judge of Birmingham, Alabama, in 1910. Although there is almost no material from his boyhood and student days, there is a fair amount of biographical and genealogical data which he obtained from friends and relatives. Significant as well is correspondence with his first wife, Josephine, his son Hugo, Jr., whom he began writing in 1937, and relatives of his wife such as Virginia Foster Durr and Clifford J. Durr. The Durr correspondence is lengthy and sometimes intimate and contains the views of prominent Southern liberals who opposed Joseph McCarthy and others who they felt were curtailing civil liberties.

A persistent theme in the Black Papers after 1954 is the tension between Black's Southern loyalty and the anger of friends, relatives, and former associates who opposed his position in Brown v. Board of Education. In addition to signing the unanimous opinion of the Warren Court in the landmark Brown case, Black supported other unpopular or controversial decisions which made him unwelcome in large parts of the South for many years. His opinions invalidating school prayer, his dissents defending the political rights of communists and other critics of the conventional order, and to a lesser degree, his longstanding support for reapportioning state legislatures all contributed to an estrangement between Black and his native region. Examples of this estrangement can be found in all portions of the collection, but are most evident in the Family Papers and General Correspondence series.

Not all reactions were hostile and included in letters with acquaintances are positive responses from Alabama friends such as Grover C. Hall, Sr. and Grover C. Hall, Jr., Jesse B. Hearin, Ben Ray, and Albert Lee Smith. Many of these supporters were editors and officeholders from the New Deal period who had known Black since his youth. Continuing well into the 1960s, their letters illustrate both the enduring standards and changing nature of Southern politics.

A noteworthy aspect of Black's development as a Supreme Court justice was his self-education. His reading habits are noted in the book files in the General Correspondence and in his letters with publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Fuller documentation of his thinking is found in his correspondence with journalists, economists, law professors, and other members of the academic community. Prominent among the scholars who engaged Black in discussions on law and society were Charles Austin Beard, Edmond Nathaniel Cahn, Irving Dilliard, Joseph Dorfman, Arthur John Keeffe, Frida Kerry Laski, Harold Joseph Laski, Leonard Williams Levy, Charles Allan Madison, and Fred Rodell. Prominent as well are letters written by political figures. Social rather than intellectual or legal in content, these letters are especially significant for the range of their signatures: five presidents, numerous senators, including Lister Hill and Paul Howard Douglas, and various reformers such as Walter Francis White and Aubrey Willis Williams.

Elected to the Senate to succeed Oscar W. Underwood in 1926, Black was among the most consistent supporters of New Deal programs. The Senatorial material in this collection shows the breadth of his loyalty. There is extensive material on wages and hours legislation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and federal regulation of public utility companies. There is also material relating to Black's committee investigations of lobbying and influence peddling. Viewed separately or as a whole, these and other Senate files are a potential source for the study of Depression economics and the New Deal coalition. Office files Black kept of political campaigns from 1926 to 1936 are an excellent guide to regional politics.

Other topics that relate to Alabama as well as national policy are job relief, tariff laws, public funding of local improvement projects, and the 1937 attempt by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alter the Supreme Court. Popularly known as the court-packing plan, the proposal was defeated when certain senators and hostile opinion led an aroused debate that blocked its approval. Black defended the plan in the Senate and on radio, receiving as a consequence thousands of letters from across Alabama and throughout the country.

Appointed in August 1937, Hugo Black as Supreme Court justice was more controversial than he had been as senator. His first test occurred even before assuming office when a Pittsburgh newspaper reported his former membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Subsequent events, large press notices, a radio speech in which Black took his case before the American people, and a deluge of mail both pro and con are included in the Speeches and Writings File and in the nomination section of the Supreme Court File. Material on the postwar controversy that reporters described as the Jackson-Black feud relates to the debate over Robert Houghwout Jackson's possible elevation to the chief justiceship, the nature of his role at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, his criticism of Black's participation in certain cases, and the conflict within the New Deal camp over the scope of the reform agenda. Correspondence with and about Black's fellow justices on this issue is located in the Special Correspondence series. A 1938 controversy that involved reputed statements by other justices about Black's status on the bench is covered in miscellaneous scrapbooks, in the General Correspondence with newspaper columnist Marquis William Childs, and in other files from the period.

The most voluminous part of the Supreme Court File is the case file material. The cases are alphabetically arranged within terms, and in many instances contain letters, memoranda, and drafts of opinions in which Black participated. Conference notes that Black had maintained were destroyed at his instruction just before he died. Although he realized the value of personal papers and endorsed their use by scholars, a memorandum in the Virginia Hamilton file reveals that he thought that conference notes were particularly subject to misinterpretation, a theme that emerged in his correspondence with S. Sidney Ulmer and his reaction to Ulmer's scholarship.

The correspondence with colleagues on the court is a useful supplement to the Supreme Court Files. Located in a separate series, the letters of the justices cover a range of subjects both personal and official. Some letters have large consequence, and others, such as one concerning a minor disagreement over shared use of the Supreme Court automobile, are little more than personal asides about daily routine. Of the correspondents in the Special Correspondence, the ones who wrote most frequently were Harold H. Burton, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and Earl Warren.

Office files in the Supreme Court File series containing invitations, routine administrative data on the office and staff, and general correspondence document the daily operation of Black's chambers. The files indicate the environment in which he worked and the evolution of his ideas expressed in his responses to requests for assistance, advice, and information. Black communicated with his former aides throughout his life. Their letters are personal as well as professional and include such prominent correspondents as Jerome A. Cooper, John Paul Frank, Nicholas Johnson, Louis F. Oberdorfer, and Charles Alan Reich. Other correspondents in the papers include Hollis Black, the justice's nephew and senatorial assistant), G. Harrold Carswell, David Jackson Davis, Hugh Gladney Grant, Erwin N. Griswold, Clement F. Haynsworth, Peterson Bryant Jarman, Carl Sandburg, and J. Skelly Wright.

The Library of Congress holds a small collection of the papers of Hugh Gladney Grant, who was Black's first Senate aide after coming to Washington.