In 1970, at the age of 84, US Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black returns to Birmingham in his first public appearance since the Court's 1954 decision of Brown v. Board of Education. It also will be Black's last trip to his home state of Alabama, which twice elected him to the US Senate before he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937. After Brown, Alabama politicians distanced themselves from Black who was widely despised and condemned in Alabama and across the South.

Amid persisting, thunderous applause, the old man's head protruded slightly above the podium as he smiled mischievously at one moment, innocently at another.

"I had a telegram from some people down in one of the Southern states," Black remembered.... "At my home [in suburban Washington] there was at one time a colored family that lived right behind my house...They were on part of the original lot on which my house is occupied," Black said.... The group wanted Judge Black to live with the "horrible" racial integration that [the US Supreme court had ordered].

By the summer of 1970, ... among the hundreds of lawyers and dignitaries standing to applaud Judge Black were Governor Albert P. Brewer and Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Howell Heflin ...

A month earlier, the state's senior U.S. Senator, John J. Sparkman ... asked Black to accompany him personally in a meeting with the nation's new Chief Justice Sparkman had entered politics supporting an incumbent Senator Hugo Black in the 1930s, but he and every other Alabama politician had kept their political distance after Brown. Until now.

A month before the bar meeting, white Alabama voters had defeated Albert Brewer, a New South moderate, and once more elected George Wallace who employed a simple run-off campaign: "Promise them the moon and holler nigger," Wallace said.

Because of Justice Black's rulings, American citizens on both sides of the Mason & Dixon line, for the first time in the nation's history, enjoyed entitlements of the Bill of Rights--individual freedoms specifically mentioned in the Constitution that no government official at any level, in any county or hamlet, could lawfully ignore.

"Our people ... were Irish...they left that country of Ireland in order to escape being hung," the Judge declared. "They were said to be related to Robert Emmet who was executed in Ireland" for attempting to overthrow English rule. "As a boy I was brought up on Robert Emmet's speech ... it was magnificent... "

In 1886, when Hugo Black's father christened his arrival on earth with a curse, distant events and voices across America were foreshadowing the persistent, pivotal themes that would shape his life and the life of his nation... the Statute of Liberty arose in New York's harbor in 1886 ... the nation's premiere beacon of hope as Americans fought over the ideals and reality of democratic inclusion.

...the Haymarket Trials of 1886, where eight editors of a union newspaper were convicted of murder and, afterwards, four were hung entirely because of their words and association--not their actions or deeds.

In 1886 ... the nation's highest court held that the American corporation (a relatively new creature) was a "person" under the Constitution... Thereafter, for three-quarters of a century, the Supreme Court barred the federal government from protecting African American citizens against rabid racialism while, in effect, vigorously requiring state and federal governments to protect corporations as full citizens.

In the same year... Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady proclaimed the arrival of a "New South..."