Charles Hamilton Houston, legal icon, Dean of Howard University Law School, and the NAACP first special counsel was born, the year before the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, on September 3, 1895, in Washington, DC. He is widely recognized as the architect of the civil rights strategy that led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education. Houston is also well known for having trained and mentored a generation of Black attorneys, including Thurgood Marshall, future founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the first Black Supreme Court Justice. At age 12, his parents enrolled him in the M Street High School, (later Dunbar High School) in Washington, DC., which was the first Black high school in the United States.
After graduation, he enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he was the only Black student in his class. Houston was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the national honor society. Upon graduating in 1915, he was selected to deliver that year’s valedictory address. After leaving Amherst, Houston returned to Washington. Houston began teaching English and “Negro Literature” at Howard University. He then joined the Army to fight in World War I in 1917. He was in the first class of African American men trained to be Army officers at Fort Des Moines, Iowa in 1917 (also the site where the first female Army officers would train during WWII). Commissioned as an infantry first lieutenant and then as a second lieutenant, he was shipped to the European theater.
Following his military discharge in 1919, he entered Harvard Law School. Charles Houston was the first African-American to serve as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. As a law student, Houston was mentored by future Supreme Court Judge Felix Frankfurter. Houston graduated in the top 5 percent of his class, earning an LL.B in 1922. He then applied for additional work leading to a degree of Doctor of Juridical Science, D.J.S. in 1923 and was awarded the prestigious Sheldon Traveling Fellowship which allowed him to study civil law at the University of Madrid. He later wrote Dean Roscoe Pound and his professor Felix Frankfurter from Madrid, asking for his recommendation to the Howard University Law School, where he was being considered for a faculty appointment. Pound’s letter assured Howard that Houston “gives promise of becoming a real legal scholar.
Houston returned to a changed America in 1924 to begin his calculated assault on Jim Crow. He was admitted to the Washington, DC bar in 1924. Houston practiced law with his father, William, at Houston & Houston, and began teaching in Howard University Law’s evening program. In the fall of 1924, Professor Houston began teaching “Agency,” “Surety and Mortgages,” “Jurisprudence,” and “Administrative Law” to first- and second-year law students at Howard. Houston demanded a lot from his students. He had no tolerance for laziness and rejected out of hand complaints about assignments being too long. When the American Bar Association refused entry to African American attorneys, he helped to establish the National Bar Association, an all-Black organization.
In 1929, Mordecai Johnson, the first Black president of Howard University, named Charles Houston to head the law school. As vice-dean of Howard University Law School (1929-35), Houston led the school's successful efforts to attain accreditation by the Association of American Law Schools and the American Bar Association. It was perhaps the first “public interest law school.” It provided an excellent legal education to a generation of brilliant African-American lawyers, many of whom later became federal judges. Houston used his position at the law school to impart to his students a vision for dismantling legalized segregation. He strove to make Howard into the sort of intellectually rigorous center of learning he saw at Harvard.
Charles Hamilton Houston shaped the school into a significant institution, at the time training almost a quarter of the nation's African American law students. During his tenure the school became accredited by the Association of American Law Schools and the American Bar Association. The school became a beacon of justice, crafting the legal arguments in favor of civil rights and training a large number of African American attorneys. During this time Houston practiced law with his father, William, at Houston & Houston. It later included, as name partner, William H. Hastie. During his tenure as dean of Howards Law School, Houston argued cases in court and continued to fight for equality within the legal community.
Houston’s legal accomplishments eventually captured the attention of Walter White, the chief executive of the NAACP. In 1935, Houston was hired as Special Counsel to the Association. This move provided Houston with an opportunity to begin to implement the legal strategy he designed to combat segregation. He committed himself on a full-time basis to direct the struggle against racist oppression in its various manifestations, and against segregated, discriminatory and unequal education in particular. His former star pupil, Thurgood Marshall, became part of the inter-racial staff he built to defend victims of racial injustice. Charles Hamilton Houston wrote to Thurgood Marshall, asking for another full-time lawyer in the national office, which Marshall eagerly accepted.
From 1935 to 1940 Charles Houston, as Special Counsel, established himself as the "architect and dominant force of the legal program of the NAACP." The "spiritual father of the Legal Defense Fund," Charles Hamilton Houston devised the legal strategy, charted the course, began a program of political education for the masses. From his post at the NAACP headquarters in New York, Charles Houston planned his legal campaign to end segregation in public education. He brought into the campaign the brightest and best young lawyers. Houston and Marshall traveled through the South in the early 1930s and noted the inequalities of African American school facilities. In response, they developed the legal strategy which challenged school segregation, first calling for the equalization of facilities for African American students and then eventually calling for full integration.
In its early years, the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was predominantly White. W.E.B Du Bois, editor of the NAACP’s official publication, "The Crisis", held down the only prominent African American role. The organization’s efforts to promote anti-lynching legislation and challenge state-supported disenfranchisement and residential segregation achieved enough success to establish the NAACP as a significant player in the civil rights field. Du Bois led a group within the organization that favored “voluntary segregation” as a solution to the problems Black Americans faced in the 1930s. For Du Bois, there was no choice for the foreseeable future between segregation and no segregation, so efforts should be directed to organizing social and political power within the Black community. Charles Hamilton Houston disagreed.
He viewed the oppressed condition of Black Americans, and others, as intolerable, and the struggle as indivisible. The fight must begin, he argued, under the prevailing separate but equal principle announced in the the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Houston’s proposed campaign to attack segregation in education impressed NAACP leaders, who appointed Houston special counsel. His campaign would proceed in three steps. First, he would make plain the inequality that existed in the educational opportunities of Blacks and Whites. Second, he would make equality too expensive for states to maintain. Finally, he would attack the "separate but equal" principle upon which segregation rested. “His ultimate goal” was the “complete eliminate of discrimination.”
It was in 1938 when Houston and his team of attorneys won the case Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. In that case, a Black student, Lloyd Gaines sought admission into the University of Missouri law school. The state offered to pay for Gaines’s tuition to attend a law school out of state, but the Supreme Court determined that Missouri had to provide Gaines, with a legal education. Since, Missouri did not have a law school for African Americans, Gaines had to be admitted to the all-White University of Missouri, which had the state’s only public law school. Though Houston’s tenure with the NAACP ended in 1940, he continued to work with other attorneys on cases that attacked the “separate but equal” doctrine. More than just a civil rights lawyer, Houston served as a publicist and champion of many causes. Houston pushed for the expulsion from the Senate of the rabid segregationist Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi.
With each victory, they inched closer to overturning Plessy v. Ferguson. In Steele v. Louisville and Nashville Railroad et. al., Houston argued that unions had to represent their members (as well as non-members in that field) regardless of race, and the Supreme Court agreed. Houston later argued three racially significant cases in the federal Supreme Court, including Hurd v. Hodge (1948), which prohibited the enforcement of “restrictive covenants” that would prohibit ownership of property based on race, which could not withstand scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. And in the in the case of "Shelly v. Kraemer", the court ruled that "judicial enforcement of private right constitutes state action for the purpose of the 14th amendment."
Charles Hamilton Houston's career of public service in general and service to his race in particular spanned only three decades. But they were decades in American history during which racism and facist oppression still found expression in some of the highest offices of the land. Charles Houston died on April 22, 1950, at the too-young age of 55, four years before the landmark Brown vs Board of Education. In Houston's life the struggle for liberty was preeminent. Houston's contributions to the elimination of legal discrimination went largely unrecognized until after his death. He was posthumously awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1950. Several public schools bear his name, as does the main building of the Howard Law School, which was dedicated in 1958.
Charles Hamilton Houston spent his life fighting for a change in the conditions and quality of life for oppressed Afro-Americans. Thurgood Marshall, who directed the NAACP’s arguments in Brown v. Board of Education, viewed Houston with an admiration that bordered on reverence. Comparing his own efforts and those of his NAACP associates to those of Houston, he told an audience of Blacks and Whites assembled to pay tribute to his former teacher and friend “We were just carrying his bags, that’s all.” “We wouldn’t have been any place if Charlie hadn’t laid the groundwork for it”. Charles Hamilton Houston was the Moses of the journey that led to Brown and beyond. He marked the path down which Marshall and others walked.
Houston argued a number of cases before the Supreme Court:
Hollins v. Oklahoma
Hale v. Kentucky
Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada
Steele v. Louisville & Nashville RR.
Hurd v. Dodge
Shelley v. Kramer