Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.

He was the senior (longest serving) justice on the court for an unprecedented twenty-five years from the death of Chief Justice Stone on April 22 1946 to his own retirement on September 17 1971. Black remained determined to desegregate the South and would call for the Supreme Court to adopt a position of "immediate desegregation" in 1969's Alexander v. "
In other instances Black took a fairly broad view of the rights of criminal defendants.

) He was first of nine Roosevelt nominees to the Court and outlasted all except for William O. During his political career Black was regarded as a staunch supporter of liberal policies and civil liberties. The fifth longest-serving justice in Supreme Court history Black is noted for his advocacy of a textualist reading of the United States Constitution and of the position that the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights were imposed on the states ("incorporated") by the Fourteenth Amendment.