On May 5, 1969, a small group of Loomis students met for an hour with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in his Washington, D.C. chambers. The esteemed jurist, then 83 years old and on the Supreme Court for 32 years, told them that he welcomed the opportunity to hear from young people about issues of the day.

It was the late 1960s, and harbingers of change in American society were evident, including decisions made that year by this Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, on freedom of speech in public schools and the media, peaceful assembly, voting rights, and lawful search and seizure. On the Island, students in their Constitutional Law course, taught by Joel Sandulli, had taken turns arguing landmark cases in American legal history, especially in regards to the First Amendment and the freedom of religion, before their own “court” of classmate “justices,” who later wrote decisions. Sitting in the grand Court Chamber that Monday morning and then later with Justice Black in his private chambers provided the ideal opportunity for the abstract to become real, for ideas to become experience.

Joel recalled the justice’s office during a recent phone conversation: “There was an enormous desk covered with books and briefs. Black was a small man, and all we could see was the top of his head.” The Log reported that the discussion with Black—an “extremely sharp [man], and very interesting to talk to”—ranged broadly with students asking “questions about unions, the draft, discrimination, and freedom of speech.” Joel remembered the justice’s responding to one question by referencing his absolutist view on the Bill of Rights and drawing out from his pocket “a dog-eared copy of the Constitution,” reading aloud the First Amendment to the Loomis boys. Two years later, The New York Times obituary for Black noted “a well-thumbed copy [of the Constitution] was always in his pocket.”

In 1969, Loomis faculty member Joel Sandulli wrote to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black asking if he would meet with students enrolled in his Constitutional Law course. Black's response, shown here, set the stage for an extraordinary moment of experiential learning.   

Appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1937, Black sat on the bench during the final years of the New Deal, World War II, and the first two decades of the Cold War. He voted with his fellow members of the Warren court on unanimous decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education that significantly expanded civil liberties, and in the words of the Times obituary, Black “argued—and prevailed time and again—that the 14^th Amendment required every state to obey every part of the Bill of Rights.” He was well respected for his jurisprudence and informed by a deep understanding of American history and a strict constructionist reading of the Constitution. His biographer, Steve Suitt, told NPR in 2005, “Judge Black had written hundreds of opinions…expanding the rights of free speech to those whom society considered unpopular, weak, poor, zealous, or hated. During the bleak years of McCarthyism, few, if any, Americans provided a steadier moral force to fight against the…hysteria about disloyalty and communism than Judge Black.”

How did Loomis students come by the opportunity to visit with Hugo Black? While teaching at another school, Joel had taken a class to visit Supreme Court Justice Byron White, with whom he shared a mutual friend, but he believes it was student research that yielded Black’s name as the justice they were most interested to meet.