The 1st Amendment

Commonly misunderstood as an attempt by the authors of the Constitution to erect a wall of "separation between church and state", the first mention of said phrase seems to have come in 1801 in a letter sent by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists.

The first appearance of the misleading phrase came in a Supreme Court decision handed down in 1947 in Emerson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, the majority opinion written by Hugo Black.

Just who was Hugo Black, anyway?

He was at one time a KKK member, was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Franklin Roosevelt after serving in the US Senate as a Democrat representing Alabama for 11 years.

By many accounts, he was a strong supporter of FDR's "New Deal" policies, and he did join in the unanimous Brown v Board of Education decision ending "separate but equal" public school policies. Viewed by many to have strongly supported individual rights, including those of minority blacks, from the bench, ultimately he seems to have been regarded as a progressive Justice who helped move the country though difficult years.

• In a rare 1968 public interview, Black reflected on his most important contributions. He put his dissent from Adamson v. California (1947) at the top of the list, but then spoke with great eloquence from one of his earliest opinions, his dissent in Chambers v. Florida (1940).