Charles L. Black, Jr. and civil rights.

• Author: Pollak, Louis H.
• Position: Columbia Law School law professor

Barbara Black has asked that I talk about Charles and civil rights. I've decided that the best way to do that is to let Charles do most of the talking. He always did most of the talking.

In 1979, in a reminiscence and rumination that appeared in the Yale Review, (1) Charles looked back twenty-four years to an enchanted evening:

In the middle of May 1955, at the Savoy Ballroom on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, a philanthropic organization in the black community gave a reception in honor of the thirty or so lawyers who had worked on the case of Brown v. Board of Education.... Thurgood lined us all up in front of the orchestra to receive the applause of the whole crowd, Margaret Truman, Averell Harriman, everybody. I turned and looked, a little wistfully, at the trumpet-player in the orchestra, a young black; "I wonder," I thought, "whether I wouldn't rather have been honored in the Savoy Ballroom for trumpet-playing?" Then I heard Thurgood, moving down the line, "... Charlie Duncan. And next over there is Charlie Black, a white man from Texas, who's been with us all the way." All the way. Yes, I guess so, if you can say that about something without beginning or end. I looked at Barbara, out at our table; no knight reaching to take the garland of victory ever saw eyes more glowing than hers as they fixed mine. (2) But for once in his life that good lawyer Charles Black misstated the facts. There had indeed been a beginning; it was an evening twenty-four years before the evening at the Savoy. Indeed, one of the chief points of Charles's piece in the Yale Review was to identify, describe, and explain that beginning evening. It happened when Charles was a freshman at the University of Texas, in Austin, his hometown. Charles recalled it this way:

In September 1931, posters appeared in Austin advertising four dances, October 12 through 15, to be played by one "Louis Armstrong, King of the Trumpet, and His Orchestra," at the old Driskill Hotel. I was entirely ignorant of jazz, and had no idea who this King might be; hyperbole is the small coin of billboards. But a dance at the Driskill, with lots of girls there, was usually worth the seventy-five cents, so I went to the first one.

... [S]ince that evening, October 12, 1931, Louis Armstrong has been a continuing presence in my life.... He was the first genius I had ever seen.... It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year old Southern boy's seeing genius, for the first time, in a black. We literally never saw a black, then, in any but a servant's capacity.... I liked most of the blacks I knew; I loved a few of them--like old Buck Green, born and raised a slave, who still...