Family and general correspondence, memoranda, reports, notebooks, research materials, case files, legal and subject files, speeches and writings, printed and near-print materials, clippings, scrapbooks, and miscellany relating primarily to Black's service in the U.S. Senate (1927-1937) and on the Supreme Court (1937-1971). Topics include the New Deal, Nuremberg war crimes trials, politics in Alabama and elsewhere in the South, Tennessee Valley Authority and public utility regulation, public service employment, tariffs, Ku Klux Klan, public school racial integration, school prayer, and First Amendment freedoms (civil rights).

Correspondents include Charles Austin Beard, Hollis Black, Josephine Foster Black, Harold H. Burton, Edmond Nathaniel Cahn, G. Harrold Carswell, Marquis William Childs, Jerome A. Cooper, David Jackson Davis, Irving Dilliard, Joseph Dorfman, Paul Howard Douglas, William O. Douglas, Clifford J. Durr, Virginia Foster Durr, John Paul Frank, Felix Frankfurter, Hugh Gladney Grant, Erwin N. Griswold, Clement F. Haynsworth, Lister Hill, Robert Houghwout Jackson, Peter Bryant Jarman, Nicholas Johnson, Arthur John Keeffe, Frida Laski, Harold Joseph Laski, Leonard Williams Levy, Charles Allan Madison. Louis F. Oberdorfer, Charles Alan Reich, Fred Rodell, Carl Sandburg, S. Sidney Ulmer, Earl Warren, Walter Francis White, Aubrey Willis Williams, and J. Skelly Wright.