With little money and few friends, Hugo Black begins practicing law in "Bad Birmingham," where he and his old Clay County friend, Barney Whatley, struggle to make a living amid a city warring over prohibition, interracial unions, racial injustice, and diversity. The city's growing corporate nature is hastened when US Steel takes over the local steel industry. A long-time civic leader, A.O. Lane, appoints Black as a city judge where he attempts to enforce law, order, and prohibition. Judge Black's well-publicized tenure on the city court bench exposes him to the evils of the "fee system," helps lead ironically to the end of local prohibition, and establishes Black as a city leader.

The signs of Birmingham's warring nature and industrial promise were evident from the platform of the L&N terminal where Hugo Black surveyed his new hometown on September 7, 1907. Northward along Birmingham's Twentieth Street rose the finished and partially finished, steel-ribbed monuments of current and future industrial empires, competing to stand tallest in the sky...

Beyond the nearest pits, mostly on the west side, were more furnaces and plants of the Tennessee, Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (T.C.I.), the city's largest corporation.

On the eastern outskirts stood a few textile plants, including Avondale Mills owned by Alabama Gov. B.B. Comer...

Hurrying to make his fortune, Black rented an office on the second floor of 1905_ Second Avenue, two blocks from both city hall and the county courthouse and four blocks from Mrs. Crim's boarding house.

In the Birmingham district, at least half of UMW members were African Americans...

Gov. B. B. Comer was in Birmingham at his textile mills when the [miners'] strike began and stayed in the city to direct state actions until the strike ended.

In late 1909, prohibitionists campaigned for a state constitutional amendment to outlaw liquor throughout Alabama.

Black reported on the popularity of Birmingham's own U.S. Congressman Oscar W. Underwood among Colorado Democrats. Black called for a national conference in Birmingham to plan the nomination of Underwood for president... His friends were promoting him in the upcoming 1912 presidential campaign as the first serious Democratic candidate from the South since Reconstruction.

Black became Judge "Hugo-to-Hell." The title stuck, perhaps because at least two of every three defendants during Black's tenure were sent to work in chain gangs on city streets.