Charles L. Black Jr., 85, Constitutional Law Expert Who Wrote on Impeachment, Dies
|
|
Prof. Charles L. Black Jr., a leading authority on constitutional law who taught at Columbia and Yale Universities for 52 years and was a prominent voice in the national debates on presidential impeachments, desegregation, the death penalty and other issues, died at his home in Manhattan on Saturday. He was 85. The cause was respiratory failure after a long illness, according to his wife, Barbara Aronstein Black. In 1931, as a 16-year-old freshman studying Greek classics at the University of Texas at Austin, Charles Black, a jazz aficionado, heard Louis Armstrong play. He was dumbstruck by the genius of the performance, and by a conundrum: ”Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place,’ ” he recalled. ”But what was the place of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?” In 1954, as a teacher of constitutional law, Professor Black composed his answer, helping Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., and others, to write the legal brief for Linda Brown, a 10-year-old student in Topeka, Kan., whose historic case, Brown v. Board of Education, became the Supreme Court’s definitive judgment on segregation in American education. More : query.nytimes.com |