1. Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1944)Google Scholar. For Bunche's role in the preparation of the Myrdal report, see Jackson, Walter, Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 121–34Google Scholar; and Urquhart, Brian, Ralph Bunche: An American Life (New York: Norton, 1993), 84–89Google Scholar. See also Southern, David W., Gunnar Myrdal and Black—White Relations (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

2. R. J. Bunche, “Interview With Mr. Justice Hugo Black: Supreme Court Building, February 13, 1940,” box 85, folder 53, Ralph Bunche Papers, University of California, Los Angeles [hereafter, “Interview”]. The authors thank Sir Brian Urquhart, the literary executor of the estate of Ralph Bunche, for permission to reprint the interview. For other references to the Black—Bunche interview, see Bunche, Ralph, The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR, ed. Grantham, Dewey W. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 208, 382–84, 386–87Google Scholar; Newman, Roger K., Hugo Black: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 427Google Scholar; and Jackson, , Gunnar Myrdal, 125–26Google Scholar.

3. For Black's admiration of Charles Beard, see Newman, , Hugo Black, 201, 453Google Scholar. For Bunche's Marxism in the 1930s, see Sitkoff, Harvard, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 56–57Google Scholar; Kirby, John B., Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 202–17Google Scholar; and Kirby, , “Race, Class, and Politics: Ralph Bunche and Black Protest,” in Ralph Bunche: The Man and His Times, ed. Rivlin, Benjamin (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990), 28–49Google Scholar.

4. For a discussion of the legal realism of Black and Bunche, respectively, see Yarbrough, Tinsley E., Mr. Justice Black and His Critics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Bunche, Ralph, “A Critical Analysis of the Tactics and Programs of Minority Groups,” Journal of Negro Education 4 (07 1936)Google Scholar, reprinted in Negro Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. Meier, August, Rudwick, Elliot, and Broderick, Francis L. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 174–79Google Scholar.

5. Hughes, Langston, “Crowns and Garlands,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Rampersad, Arnold (New York: Knopf, 1995), 551Google Scholar; originally published in the Nation (January 16, 1967). For more on Bunche's image as a symbol of the “establishment,” see Keppel, Ben, The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry and Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), ch. 4Google Scholar.

6. The standard biography of Bunche is Urquhart's Ralph Bunche: An American Life. See also Haskins, Jim, Ralph Bunche: A Most Reluctant Hero (New York: Hawthorn, 1974)Google Scholar; Mann, Peggy, Ralph Bunche: U.N. Peacemaker (New York: Coward, McCann, Geoghan, 1975)Google Scholar; and Rivlin's Ralph Bunche: The Man and His Times.

7. Bunche and other young black radicals particularly objected to the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), whose section 7a granted recognition to racially exclusive unions, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), whose crop-reduction programs facilitated the displacement of the largely black sharecropper labor force, as well as the Social Security Act of 1935, which excluded domestics and agricultural laborers, the two largest categories of black workers, from coverage. Many of these issues arose at a 1935 Howard University conference that Bunche cochaired on “The Position of the Negro in the Present Crisis,” during which Bunche condemned the New Deal as a form of “state capitalism” akin to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. See Bunche, Ralph, “Critique of New Deal Social Planning as It Affects Negroes,” Journal of Negro Education 6 (01 1936): 59–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. See Bunche, , “Critical Analysis,” 171–74Google Scholar.

9. Ibid., 174.

10. Ibid., 172.

11. Ibid., 173–74.

12. See, for example, Ralph Bunche's unpublished manuscript, “Notes on Worker's Movement, 2/11/40,” in box 61, folder 30, Ralph Bunche Papers, University of California, Los Angeles.

13. For Bunche's comments on the Nazi—Soviet Pact, see Bunche, , Political Status, 112Google Scholar. In the unpublished manuscript of a speech entitled “Some Observations on Black and White Thinking on the Negro Problem” (unpublished paper for the American Association for Adult Education's Third Annual Conference on Adult Education and the Negro,delivered on January 31, 1941,at Howard UniversityGoogle Scholar) (box 43, Ralph Bunche Papers, University of California, Los Angeles) lies the comment “Hitler must be beaten, and Stalin must not win, lest even lip-service can no longer be paid to democracy” (20). Handwritten brackets surround the clause “and Stalin must not win,” however, indicating that perhaps the comment was excised from the final speech. For Bunche's relations with the Communist Party during the 1930s, see Henry, Charles P., “Civil Rights and National Security: The Case of Ralph Bunche,” in Rivlin, , Ralph Bunche, 54–55Google Scholar.

14. Bunche was pleased by the programs of the National Youth Organization, founded in 1935, which distributed assistance directly to Southern blacks, and by the so-called Black Cabinet, the growing number of blacks occupying positions of influence within the Roosevelt administration, such as his friends Robert Weaver and Mary McLeod Bethune. Bunche was particularly impressed by the efforts of the Resettlement Administration, beginning in 1937, which aided displaced tenant farmers to purchase land, and by the cotton referendum elections sponsored by the AAA, which offered many blacks their first opportunity to vote. See Kirby, “Race, Class, and Politics,” 37; and generally Bunche, Ralph, “The Negro in the Political Life of the United States,” Journal of Negro Education 10 (07 1941): 567–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. For Black's early years, see Van der Veer Hamilton, Virginia, Hugo Black: The Alabama Years (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

16. For Black's attitudes toward capitalism, see Newman, , Hugo Black, 226, 227Google Scholar; and “Interview,” 13. Black's hatred of Substantive Due Process is treated in Black, Hugo L., A Constitutional Faith (New York: Knopf, 1968)Google Scholar. For the court-packing scheme, see Newman, , Hugo Black, 211–19, 233–39Google Scholar; and generally Leuchtenberg, William E., The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), ch. 3Google Scholar.

17. For Black's race-related actions during his Senate days, see Van der Veer Hamilton, Virginia, “Lister Hill, Hugo Black, and the Albatross of Race,” Alabama Law Review 36 (1985): 845Google Scholar.

18. Black justified his opposition on the grounds that the expansion of federal police power “would crucify the hopes and aspirations of the millions of workers in this country” by making it easier to certify public gatherings as “mobs.” Anti-lynching legislation would also be needlessly divisive, Black felt, and “spread the flame of racial antagonism” (Newman, , Hugo Black, 201–3Google Scholar).

19. Once elevated to the Supreme Court, Black did offer some behind-the-scenes support for appeals stemming from the case. See Goodman, James, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 317Google Scholar.

20. Black joined the Klan in Birmingham on September 13, 1923. The Klan tacitly supported his successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 1926. In July 1925, he followed the advice of the Grand Dragon of his Klavern, Jim Esdale, and wrote a letter of resignation from the Klan that Esdale kept for future release should his Klan membership prove controversial. He signed the letter “Yours, I.T.S.U.B. [In The Sacred, Unfailing Bond], Hugo L. Black” (Ball, Howard and Cooper, Phillip J., Of Power and Right: Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and America's Constitutional Revolution [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], 20–22Google Scholar). On numerous occasions until the end of his life, Black minimized the significance of his connections to the Klan (“Interview,” 8–9; and Leuchtenberg, , Supreme Court Reborn, 206–10Google Scholar). Black's wife reported that in later years Black had told her joining the Klan had been the greatest mistake of his life, because it cost him a chance at the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1944, and thus the presidency (Mr. Justice and Mrs. Black: The Memoirs of Hugo L. and Elizabeth Black [New York: Random House, 1986], 216Google Scholar). For the Klan in the interwar years, see MacLean, Nancy, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

21. For Missouri ex. rel. Gaines v. Canada 305 US 337 (1938), see “Interview,” 3; Tushnet, Mark V., Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 121–22Google Scholar; and Kluger, Richard, Simple Justice: The History of Brown vs. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1975), 212–13Google Scholar. After his victory, Gaines disappeared and never attended the University of Missouri.

22. The 1939 Birmingham convention of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare is described in Egerton, John, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 185–97Google Scholar. On Black's attendance at the Marian Anderson recital, see Kluger, , Simple Justice, 591Google Scholar.

23. Chambers v. Florida 309 US 227 (1940) at 241. Black had originally refused to hear the case, but had nonetheless been assigned the majority opinion by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who knew of Black's long-standing hatred of coerced confessions, and who thought a strong civil rights opinion by Black would help destroy his image as a former Klansman (Pusey, Merlo J., Charles Evans Hughes [New York: Columbia University Press, 1963], 774Google Scholar; cited in Leuchtenberg, , Supreme Court Reborn, 216Google Scholar). Despite his affirmation, as the interview the following day showed, Black (like Bunche) had profound doubts about the role of the courts could play in eliminating the systematic discrimination blacks faced in the Southern legal system (“Interview,” 2).

24. “Interview,” 13.

25. Ibid., 1–2, 9.

26. Ibid., 9, 11. Black asserts that the main reason for less racial discrimination in New England than Alabama is that fewer blacks are in New England. Therefore, he argues that the geographic dispersion of blacks will lessen racial tensions (10).

27. After Black's membership in the Klan became public knowledge, he frequently told reporters that “Walter White of the NAACP” was one of his closest friends. The two men had worked together on progressive reform legislation for several years (White, Walter, A Man Called White [1948; rept. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 177–79]Google Scholar.

28. One of Black's favorite books was Bowers, Claude's The Tragic Era (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928)Google Scholar, a strident attack on black suffrage during Reconstruction (Newman, , Hugo Black, 143Google Scholar). For Southern populist fears of black voting strength, see Vann Woodward, C., The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed. (1957; rept. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 83–88Google Scholar; and Williamson, Joel, The Crucible of Race: Black–White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 111–79Google Scholar. The best study of the Alabama Constitutional Convention of 1901 is Hackney, Sheldon's Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Cell, John W. argues persuasively that black disfranchisement was largely an elite-led process (The Highest Stage of White Supremacy [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 119–22, 184–87)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. At least through the early 1940s, Black was convinced that the best way to aid Southern blacks was through education and enlightenment of poor Southern whites. Black was proud of his (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts in early 1937 to get a federal education bill through the Senate. Despite the importunings of Walter White, Black (who five years previously had publicly expressed horror at the idea of equal funding for black and white education in Alabama) refused to risk political capital on its support. He felt, as he told White, that “when white Southerners are educated and given economic security there will be less prejudice against the Negro — fewer lynchings, more jobs, greater justice for the Negro” (White, , Man Called White, 178Google Scholar).

29. “Interview,” 2, 4, 10.

30. Ibid., 3.

31. Black's fear of endemic venereal infection in the black community was common among Southern whites of his generation. Closely related to the perception of African Americans as wildly oversexed and lacking in self-control, its most infamous manifestation was the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, conducted in Black's home state of Alabama, in which, for almost forty years, starting in 1932, four hundred black men suffering from syphilis were left untreated by the U.S. Public Health Service in order to trace the progress of their disease. See Jones, James H., Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York: Free Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

32. “Interview,” 3.

33. Ibid., 12.

34. During his years in the Senate, 1934–46, Mississippian Theodore G. Bilbo (1878–1947) became a byword of racial reaction. Bilbo, notorious for race-baiting public speeches, introduced into the Senate “The Greater Liberia Act,” which provided for the forcible return of blacks to Africa, a policy he endorsed as the only possible solution to the race problem in his book, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization (1947). (Egerton, , Speak Now, 402Google Scholar). Bilbo himself had a somewhat different understanding of the Wages and Hours Bill than Black imagined. In 1940, he explained to Gunnar Myrdal his rationale for supporting the bill: “The real importance of this law is that it puts up the wages and by that makes it possible for the white man to grab the nigger's job. The niggers are just put out of business in the South” (Bunche, , Political Status, 206Google Scholar). Bilbo was likely correct that the minimum wage legislation further eroded the distinction between low-paid black work and higher-salaried white labor. This trend, ongoing in the Southern economy since the 1920s, often led to employers replacing black workers with white workers and was a contributing factor in the migration of Southern blacks (see Anderson, James D., The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1930 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988], 216–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

35. Bunche, , Political Status, 386–87Google Scholar.

36. Ibid., 39.

37. “Interview,” 11.

38. For Bunche, 's alarm at African-American indifference to the war effort, see his Political Status (109–14)Google Scholar and “The Role of the University in the Political Orientation of Negro Youth,” Journal of Negro Education 9 (10 1940): 571–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For evidence of the strength of the antiwar and pro-Japanese sentiments among African Americans in the early phases of World War II, see Drake, St. Clair and Cayton, Horace R., Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945; rept. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 744–46Google Scholar; and Myrdal, (American Dilemma, 814–15)Google Scholar. Myrdal cites a report indicating that almost 20 percent of blacks interviewed favored a Japanese victory in the war (1400).

39. For the growing importance of civil rights activities in the early 1940s, see Sitkoff, , New Deal, 298–335Google Scholar; Goodwin, Doris Kearns, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Home Front During World War II (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 165–71, 537–41Google Scholar; Gavins, F. Raymond, The Perils and Prospects of Southern Leadership: Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884–1970 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1977), 100–28Google Scholar; Kelley, Robin D. B., “The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics During World War II,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 161–82Google Scholar; and generally Pfeffer, Paula F. A., A. Philip Randolph: Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990)Google Scholar, and Logan, Rayford W., ed., What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944)Google Scholar. See also Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis; Wolters, Raymond, Negroes and the Great Depression (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1970)Google Scholar; Weiss, Nancy J., Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

40. Virginius Dabney, who crusaded against lynching and the Klan in the 1930s, attacked A. Philip Randolph as an extremist in a 1943 article in the New Republic, and Mark Ethridge stated publicly that no power in the world, Axis or otherwise, could persuade the South to abandon racial segregation (Egerton, , Speak Now, 216, 254–56Google Scholar).

41. In the spring of 1940, Black recommended to Roosevelt the nationalization of the munitions industry. His commitment to a federal civil rights agenda may have been reinforced by his findings during a secret mission he undertook for Roosevelt in June 1942 to investigate racial tensions in Birmingham defense plants (Newman, , Hugo Black, 312–13Google Scholar).

42. For Korematsu 323 US 214 (1944), see Yarbrough, Mr. Justice Black.

43. Newman, , Hugo Black, 428Google Scholar.

44. Black's reading of the legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment, and his reliance on its Radical Republican framers, was bitterly attacked by Black's colleague, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and a number of Frankfurter's proteges at leading law schools. They argued, in part, following the current historiography of the time, that the Radical Republicans were not that important because they did not represent the mainstream of American politics. Black would have none of this. See Simon, James F., The Antagonists: Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter and Civil Liberties in Modern America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989)Google Scholar.

45. For Black's postwar civil libertarianism, see Yarbrough, Mr. Justice Black.

46. For Black's growing conservatism in his last years on the Court, see Newman, , Hugo Black, 538–70Google Scholar.

47. Bunche, , Political Status, 113Google Scholar.

48. Myrdal, , American Dilemma, 4Google Scholar. Myrdal's quote was from Bunche's memorandum “Conceptions and Ideologies of the Negro Problem,” a condensed version of which was published as Bunche, Ralph, “Conceptions and Ideologies of the Negro Problem,” Contributions in Black Studies 9–10 (1992): 77Google Scholar. Myrdal's citation omitted the opening passage of the paragraph, however, in which Bunche states, “the American population is one whose thinking is largely ‘reflex’ and finds convenient stream-lined expression through the ‘pat responses’ and the conventionalized stereotype.”

49. Bunche, , “Black and White Thinking,” 3Google Scholar.

50. Ralph Bunche, “The Dilemma of the Negro,” speech, February 20, 1941, at Northwestern University Better Understanding Week, box 61, folder 24, Ralph Bunche Papers, University of California, Los Angeles, 5. Bunche, expressed identical sentiments in Political Status, 110Google Scholar.

51. Bunche, , “Role of the University,” 574Google Scholar.

52. Keppel, , Work of Democracy, 45–70Google Scholar. James F. Byrnes, later notorious as a segregationist South Carolina governor, had been responsible, while U.S. Secretary of State, for appointing Bunche to the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission and the United Nations, while Harry Truman, who had Confederate ancestors, had offered him the post of Assistant Secretary of State (Bunche declined because he refused to live in Washington, D.C., a segregated city). For Bunche's postwar attitudes on race, see Bunche, Ralph, “Lincoln's Day Address: The International Significance of Human Relations,” 1951 pamphlet reprinted in Rivlin, , Ralph Bunche, 236–46Google Scholar; and Urquhart, , Ralph Bunche, 240–42Google Scholar. Bunche retained great respect for Black. In a 1952 letter about the racial views of Alabama Senator John Sparkman, then running for Vice-President, Bunche said, “I do not know Sparkman very well. I met him several times when he was on the U.S. delegation here [at the United Nations] and he was always very friendly. He may improve if freed of dependence on Alabama voters but I suspect he will never be a heavyweight in the Hugo Black sense. Even so, I would take him over [Richard] Nixon [the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee] with my eyes shut” (Ralph Bunche to Walter White, August 8, 1952, Bunche correspondence, box 1, folder 26, Walter White Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University).

53. Bunche spent his last years concentrating on plans for dispersal of ghetto residents (Urquhart, , Ralph Bunche, 440–53Google Scholar). Bunche's late disillusion is baldly demonstrated in his last public speech, the July 10, 1969, address to the Fifth East—West Philosophers Conference, “On Race: The Alienation of Modern Man,” in Rivlin, , Ralph Bunche, 252–64Google Scholar.

54. Presumably Pierre v. Louisiana 306 US 354 (1939), in which Black, writing for a unanimous court, held that the exclusion of African Americans from grand juries was unconstitutional.

55. For the tortured history of the Texas Primary cases see Hine, Darlene Clark, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Milwood, N.Y.: Kro Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

56. The Fletcher—Black bill, introduced in 1937, would have provided $300 million in direct aid to the states for education. It ran into opposition from New Deal opponents and was never brought to a final vote.

57. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada 305 US 337 (1938).

58. Walter White (1893–1955), executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955.

59. Theodore Bilbo (1877–1947), Mississippi governor (1916–20) and U.S. Senator (1934–46).

60. Shortly after the beginning of the 1938 Birmingham conference of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the notorious Theophilius Eugene “Bull” Connor, at the outset of his tenure as the city's police commissioner, demanded that the conference obey Birmingham's segregated seating ordinances. Debate over whether to obey Connor overshadowed the remainder of the conference, including the presentation of an award to Black, to his evident annoyance (Egerton, , Speak Now, 185–97Google Scholar).

61. In the original typescript, “slightly.”

62. In the original typescript, “hand-over.”

63. Hiram Wesley Evans (1881–?), Alabama-born dentist from Dallas, Texas, who was named Imperial Wizard, the Klan's highest position, in 1922, and who led the Klan until 1939. Under Evans, the Klan reached its height of power during the early 1920s, before being weakened by financial and moral scandals and state unmasking laws. In 1937, during Hugo Black's confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, Evans asserted that his friend Black, whom he had helped bring into the Klan, was neither a member nor a sympathizer. He remained Imperial Wizard until 1939.

64. Mistranscribed as “Downes County” in the original typescript.

65. Walter Francis George (1878–1957), Georgia senator (1923–56).

66. Al Smith (1873–1944), governor of New York (1918–20 and 1922–28), and unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate in 1928.

67. Robert Russa Moton (1867–1940), the Southern educator who was Booker T. Washington's successor as president of Tuskegee Institute, and one of the leading Southern black moderates in the interwar years. His 1930 book, What the Negro Thinks, which called forthrightly for the end of legalized racial inequality, is evidence of some advance beyond Washington's accommodationism.

68. In the original typescript, “conservatively.”

69. Frank Johnson, Sr. (?) (?–?), conservative Alabama politician and father of federal judge and civil rights hero Frank Johnson.

70. George William Norris (1861–1944), Republican, later Independent, U.S. Representative (1902–12) and Senator (1913–42) from Nebraska famous for his attachment to progressive causes, and cosponsor of the prolabor 1932 Norris–LaGuardia Act.

71. Herbert Clark Hoover (1874–1964), 31st President of the United States (1929–33). A conservative Republican, Hoover was discredited by his fiscal orthodoxy and apparent inability to take effective action during the Great Depression.

72. In the original typescript, “anonymous.”

73. Mabel Jones West (?–?), an obscure figure who was Alabama Women's Democratic Committee chair and leader of the executive committee of the Alabama Branch of the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

74. Mistranscribed as “and” in the original typescript.

75. (Joseph) Lister Hill (1894–1984), Alabama populist, member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1923–38) and then the U.S. Senate (1938–69). Best known as cosponsor of the Hill—Barton Act (1946), which provided federal funds for hospital construction in rural areas.

76. In the original typescript, “people.”

77. A conjectural reading. In the original typescript, “Aesop.”

78. If the reading of Esau for Aesop is correct, Black was likely referring to Genesis 27:1–41.

79. In the originate typescript, “rigorous.”