USS Black, a 2050-ton Fletcher class destroyer built at Kearny, New Jersey, was commissioned in May 1943. After shakedown and training in the western Atlantic and Caribbean areas, she passed through the Panama Canal in mid-November 1943 to join the war against Japan. Black's first combat operations took place during that month and the next, as she served in the newly-captured Gilbert Islands on patrol, escort and air-sea rescue duties. In the first seven months of 1944 the destroyer participated in the campaigns to capture positions in the Marshalls, Admiralties, northern New Guinea and the Marianas. She was next in combat during the invasion of Leyte in October and subsequently escorted reinforcement convoys to the Philippines. In addition to performing screening missions during this time, Black occasionally used her guns to bombard the enemy ashore.

Following overhaul in the United States, Black returned to the Western Pacific in March 1945 and immediately took part in aircraft carrier raids on Japan. She served as a radar picket ship and carrier escort during much of the long and brutal Okinawa campaign in April, May and June, surviving several air attacks with minor damage. In July Black screened battleships and cruisers during two bombardments of the Japanese home islands and, on 15 August 1945, the day Japan agreed to surrender, was present during one of the Pacific War's final Kamikaze suicide plane attacks. After supporting occupation operations off China and Korea in September and October, Black steamed back to the U.S. West Coast, where she was placed out of commission in August 1946.

The Cold War brought Black back into commission in July 1951. Atlantic Fleet service followed, broken by a Korean War deployment that took her around the World, westbound, between January and August 1953. At the beginning of 1955 she permanently returned to the Pacific. Over the next decade and a half, Black regularly crossed the great ocean to take her place as a unit of the Seventh Fleet, serving as an aircraft carrier escort, taking part in antisubmarine warfare exercises, patrolling in the Taiwan Strait and visiting ports throughout the Far East. Her tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth post-World War II Western Pacific deployments, beginning in early 1965, included Vietnam War service. Among her duties during this time were early participation in "Market Time" coastal patrol and interdiction operations, providing naval gunfire support for forces ashore and screening carriers as they took the war to the North Vietnamese enemy. USS Black's last overseas cruise ended in July 1969. She was decommissioned in late September of that year and sold for scrapping in February 1971.

USS Black was named in honor of Lieutenant Commander Hugh D. Black (1903-1942), who was killed in action during the sinking of USS Jacob Jones (DD-130) in February 1942.