A Tale of Two Alabamians: Justice Hugo Black and Judge William Pryor

I must recommend that you read Steve Dillard's (aka "Feddie's") excellent, excellent post at Southern Appeal titled "Whitewashing the racist/anti-Catholic legacy of Justice Hugo Black".

[ED.: Steve's post is archived at the now defunct Southern Appeal - search on the title "Whitewashing the racist/anti-Catholic legacy of Justice Hugo Black" to find it.]

In it, Feddie takes on author Steve Suitts for his "pathetic hit piece against Judge William H. Pryor, Jr., entitled 'Misjudging Hugo Black: Pryor restraint needed'." The Suitts piece with which Feddie takes issue attacks Pryor for a speech he delivered to the St. Thomas More Society of Atlanta that was critical of Black's trial tactics in defending the murderer of a Catholic priest when Black was an Alabama lawyer in the 1920s.

Even though I am a lifelong conservative with an originalist philosophy, I once considered Hugo Black to be a hero. Although his doctrine of total incorporation of the Bill of Rights (i.e. the view that the entire Bill of Rights should apply to the states and not just the federal government) was certainly not an "originalist" view of the Constitution, an argument can be made that it was a "strict constructionist" or "textualist" one -- Black hoped that total incorporation would slow the invention of rights by the Court via "substantive due process".

Too late did Black recognize that his judicial activism in pursuit of judicial restraint had helped to create a superlegislative monster out of the Supreme Court, a fact he lamented frequently in his dissenting opinions to the Court's "fundamental rights" decisions toward the end of his career.

I no longer consider Hugo Black to be a hero -- Feddie's post only reinforces why that is the case. I do, however, consider Black a tragic figure -- the sort of person Shakespeare might have written about, without, of course, whitewashing his serious shortcomings.