Hugo Black was no more a strict constructionist or originalist than Earl Warren, David Souter, or Ruth Ginsburg.Well, I put that stuff in scare quotes for a reason. But Black did regard himself as a strict constructionist and an advocate of judicial restraint; in fact he was the lone holdout in Griswold, the well-known privacy-rights case. Whatever anyone thinks of his specific views about what strict construction commits us to, his judicial philosophy was "conservative" in this sense -- which, admittedly, may just go to show that the philosophical label doesn't tell you what's going to appear in the opinions.
It's not that easy. One group (among others including Hugo Black, William Douglas, Earl Warren. William Brennan) believed that the XIV Amdt. made the entire Bill of Rights applicable to the states. The other (which included f.ex. Robert Jackson, Felix Frankfurter, John Marshall Harlan and Stanley Reed) didn't share these views and advocated "selective incorporation" (Justice Harlan believed that the SCOTUS should use the XIV Amdt. to strike down laws that were "shocking to the conscience"). Now the difference between Justice Black and other advocates of the incorporation doctrine was that Justices Douglas, Warren, Murphy, et.al. claimed that the XIV Amdt. also covered many other unenumerated rights, whereas Black believed that it ONLY covered the Bill of Rights (read literally) and nothing more. Therefore in the 50s he was considered a hard-core liberal because he took a very liberal view on the First Amdt. (for Black, who believed that it was made applicable against the states, "no law", literally meant no law, including no law prohibiting, say, child pornography) and other BoR issues. OTOH in the 60s many people said that he became a conservative, because he refused to join many rulings which created new rights or interpreted the Constitution in a "creative" manner.
Examples:
GRISWOLD v. CONNECTICUT, 381 U.S. 479, (1965) (Black, J., dissenting)
(...)The Court talks about a constitutional "right of privacy" as though there is some constitutional provision or provisions forbidding any law ever to be passed which might abridge the "privacy" of individuals. But there is not. There are, of course, guarantees in certain specific constitutional provisions which are designed in part to protect privacy at certain times and places with respect to certain activities. Such, for example, is the Fourth [381 U.S. 479, 509] Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures." (...) The due process argument which my Brothers HARLAN and WHITE adopt here is based, as their opinions indicate, on the premise that this Court is vested with power to invalidate all state laws that it considers to be arbitrary, capricious, unreasonable, or oppressive, or on this Court's belief that a particular state law under scrutiny has no "rational or justifying" purpose, or is offensive to a "sense of fairness and justice." If these formulas based on "natural justice," or others which mean the same thing, are to prevail, they require judges to determine [381 U.S. 479, 512] what is or is not constitutional on the basis of their own appraisal of what laws are unwise or unnecessary. The power to make such decisions is of course that of a legislative body. Surely it has to be admitted that no provision of the Constitution specifically gives such blanket power to courts to exercise such a supervisory veto over the wisdom and value of legislative policies and to hold unconstitutional those laws which they believe unwise or dangerous.(...) My Brother GOLDBERG has adopted the recent discovery that the Ninth Amendment as well as the Due Process Clause can be used by this Court as authority to strike down all state legislation which this Court thinks [381 U.S. 479, 519] violates "fundamental principles of liberty and justice," or is contrary to the "traditions and [collective] conscience of our people." He also states, without proof satisfactory to me, that in making decisions on this basis judges will not consider "their personal and private notions." One may ask how they can avoid considering them. Our Court certainly has no machinery with which to take a Gallup Poll. And the scientific miracles of this age have not yet produced a gadget which the Court can use to determine what traditions are rooted in the "[collective] conscience of our people."
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District 393 U.S. 503 (1969), (Black, J., dissenting)
The Court's holding in this case ushers in what I deem to be an entirely new era in which the power to control pupils by the elected "officials of state supported public schools . . ." in the United States is in ultimate effect transferred to the Supreme Court. (...) I deny, therefore, that it has been the "unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years" that "students" and "teachers" take with them into the "schoolhouse gate" constitutional rights to "freedom of speech or expression." (...) The truth is that a teacher of kindergarten, grammar school, or high school pupils no more carries into a school with him a complete right to freedom of speech and expression than an anti-Catholic or anti-Semite carries with him a complete freedom of speech and religion into a Catholic church or Jewish synagogue. Nor does a person carry with him into the United States Senate or House, or into the Supreme Court, or any other court, a complete constitutional right to go into those places contrary to their rules and speak his mind on any subject he pleases. It is a myth to say that any person has a constitutional right to say what he pleases, where he pleases, and when he pleases. (...) This case, therefore, wholly without constitutional reasons, in my judgment, subjects all the public schools in the country to the whims and caprices of their loudest-mouthed, but maybe not their brightest, students. I, for one, am not fully persuaded that school pupils are wise enough, even with this Court's expert help from Washington, to run the 23,390 public school systems in our 50 States. I wish, therefore, wholly to disclaim any purpose on my part to hold that the Federal Constitution compels the teachers, parents, and elected school officials to surrender control of the American public school system to public school students. I dissent.
I wouldn't call these views too liberal...