Remembering Charles L. Black.

AuthorLeebron, David W.
PositionColumbia Law School law professor

Welcome to all who are gathered today to celebrate the life, achievements, contributions, and friendship of Charles Black.

Charles Black began and ended his academic career at Columbia Law School. From 1947 through 1956, he taught as a full member of the faculty, and after his retirement from Yale in 1986, he returned and taught for another thirteen years. We have forgiven Yale its act of theft, and we, along with Yale Law School, are honored to be hosting this service together. These two great institutions of legal education, along with Charles's family, colleagues, friends, great lawyers and judges of this city, and many others, gather together to join in celebrating Charles's life. We welcome you all to this celebration.

Columbia University's President George Rupp asked me to convey his regrets that he could not be with us today. He is out of the country, and asked me to express on his behalf his admiration of Charles, and his appreciation for his contribution as teacher and scholar to Columbia and to the betterment of our world.

Jack Greenberg, a friend of Charles's for five decades, also regretted that he could not be here. He described Charles as "a colleague in the civil rights movement who was there at the very beginning." Charles is indeed one of those rare academics who is known both for his intellectual contributions to scholarship and his work as a lawyer on some of the most important cases and issues of our time. Most famously, he was one of the architects and writers of the briefs that helped a ten-year-old gift break the barriers of segregation across this country in the society-shaking case of Brown v. Board of Education. Chief Justice Warren described Charles's subsequent scholarly work on segregation as vital to the ongoing work of that Court.

Charles is a man who, in many ways, is hard even to begin to describe. In our home, we have a volume of Charles's poetry, his pathbreaking book on capital punishment, and a painting he gave our son Daniel shortly after his birth. And Charles even signed the painting with the Chinese character for his name! That was Charles: poet, legal scholar, painter, not to mention musician, and a scholar in several other fields.

Charles's work continues to tower over several fields. He arrived at Columbia in the age when professors were still simply assigned what the School needed taught rather than what they wanted...

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