Charles L. Black: His Heart and Mind

Georgetown Law Journal, Apr 2004 by Greenberg, Jack

I have asked the person who knew him best, Barbara Black, what there was about Louis Armstrong that turned Charles on, as the phrase goes, to devote so much of his life to combating racism. She pondered. She did not know. Several days later she told me that she had consulted with members of the family. Nobody knows. Charles might have written a poem in response.

I have scrutinized Charles's writings, and little appears. There are a few tantalizing sentences about his father bonding with a black man, the two of them gazing out over the City of Austin and fondly reflecting on one or another of its aspects.49 Charles has written that "[w]hen I was a boy of ten, I formed an emotional friendship of some depth with a seventy-five-year-old black man named Buck Green, whom I knew to have been born and raised to the age of fifteen as a slave." Charles had a deep emotional reaction to the fact that "[w]e are bound to the times of slavery . . . I am a late contemporary of thousands of American slaves."50 But, nothing meaningful beyond that.

Whether it matters or not, we will never know why he gave so much of himself to what he did. The motivation doesn't matter, anyway. It certainly cannot be instilled in another. In the end, we will have to be satisfied with the great good accomplished by his mind, its awesome creativity and the heart that set its direction.

1. CHARLES BLACK, OWLS BAY IN BABYLON (1980); CHARLES L. BLACK, JR., TELESCOPES AND ISLANDS (1963); CHARLES BLACK, THE WAKING PASSENGER (1983).

2. See Jack Greenberg, In Tribute to Charles L. Black, Jr., 95 YALE L.J. 1559 (1986) (providing bibliography of poems not included within volumes of poetry).

3. See Correspondence, 27 J. MAR. L. & COM. 501 (1996) ("I started teaching admiralty [at Columbia Law School] because they told me to."). Knowing nothing about it, Charles did as he was told and went on to become one of the leading authorities on the subject.

4. See GRANT GILMORE & CHARLES L. BLACK, JR., THE LAW OF ADMIRALTY (1957).

5. See Charles L. Black, Jr., My World with Louis Armstrong, 95 YALE L.J. 1595 (1986).

6. Id. at 1597.

7. See Brown v. Bd. of Educ., 347 U.S. 483, 494 (1954).

8. JACK GREENBERG, CRUSADERS IN THE COURTS (1994).

9. Charles's Columbia colleague, Walter Gellhorn, conducted a seminar in civil liberties and civil rights that he named Legal Survey. He selected the innocuous title because a course named Civil Rights might expose students and faculty involved in it to charges of being communists. Indeed, Walter felt compelled to appear before one of the House committees investigating un-American activities to swear that he was not a member of the communist party. See Tax-Exempt Foundations: Hearing Before the House Select Comm. To Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, 82d Cong. 735 (1952) (statement of Walter Gellhorn, Law Professor, Columbia University). The Columbia Dean of that era, Young B. Smith, chastised Charles because he had signed a friend of the court brief for appellants in Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950), which in 1950, for all practical purposes, held unconstitutional segregation of legal education. Later, in 1955, he informed Columbia Dean William Warren that Yale Law School had offered him the Henry Luce chair. Charles's desire was to stay at Columbia and he hoped that Warren would urge him to stay. Warren's response was merely "Congratulations." Charles then felt he had no choice but to go to Yale. What role, if any, Charles's involvement in civil rights played in the decanal response can only be guessed. Charles believed that it may have played a part. The assertions in this footnote are based on a number of conversations with Charles and Barbara Black over a period of perhaps fifty years. Before submitting this Essay, I showed it to Barbara Black and asked her to confirm the accuracy of the text to which this note is appended, as well as that of other statements about Charles in the Essay. She told me that what I have written is correct.