He is chairman of the neurosurgery department and director of the Maxine Dunitz Neurosurgical Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.

His mother, Lillian, was a teacher and his father, Robert, was the principal at a racially segregated elementary school in Auburn, Alabama; prohibited by law to integrate the student body, Black's father instead integrated the faculty, raised standards, and brought more challenging subjects to the school.

Already interested in medicine, Black was admitted to an apprenticeship program for minority students at Case Western Reserve University, and then became a teenage lab assistant for Frederick Cross and Richard Jones (inventors of the Cross-Jones artificial heart valve) at St. Luke's Hospital in Cleveland.

[2] At 17, he won an award in a national science competition for research on the damage done to red blood cells in patients with heart-valve replacements.

[17][18] The accompanying article described Black's reputation as a surgeon who would operate on tumors that other doctors would not, as well as aspects of his medical research, including his discovery that the peptide bradykinin can be effective in opening the blood–brain barrier.