He was known as "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow". 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 twelve, the Houstons gave their son perhaps his greatest gift. They enrolled Charles in the remarkable M Street High School, in Washington, DC, later named Dunbar High School, which was the first Black high school in the United States, taught by some of the best Black teachers in America.
After graduation, at age 15, he enrolled at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he was the only Black student in his class of 1915. He described himself as “too shy or too proud” to visit his classmates in the all-White fraternity houses. He had “very few friends in town and rarely paid a social visit.” The alienation he felt on account of racism seemed to spur his academic achievement and growing self-reliance. 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. Houston graduated as one of six valedictorians from Amherst College. After leaving Amherst, Houston returned to Washington and began teaching English and “Negro Literature” at Howard University.
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, he joined the U.S. Army. The efforts of his father earned Charles a position at the first Black officers’ training camp, Fort Des Moines, Iowa in 1917 (also the site where the first female Army officers would train during WWII). In months of training at Fort Des Moines, then Camp Meade, and then Camp Dix, Charles Houston found himself harassed, abused, and reprimanded for his audacity to “raise hell” about racial discrimination and arbitrary assignments. Charles had to endure the racist attitudes of his Camp Commander Colonel Charles Ballou, who claimed his Black troops lacked the “mental potential and higher qualities of character essential to command and leadership”—even though over forty per cent of his men were college graduates. This deepened his intention to study law. Commissioned as an infantry first lieutenant and then as a second lieutenant, he was shipped to the European theater.
In his first military appointment, as judge-advocate, Charles was assigned the task of prosecuting a case involving two African American soldiers charged with disorderly conduct. Charles investigated the incident and found the charges to have little substance. When he subsequently failed to win a conviction of the two accused soldiers, his superior told him he was “no good.” Charles became further embittered when he witnessed the conviction of an African American sergeant—regarded by other Blacks as one of the best in the company—on charges of disorderly conduct and insubordination even though the sergeant was carrying out the orders of a superior officer. Houston found that “the hate and scorn showered on Negro officers by our fellow Americans…convinced me there was no sense in dying for a world ruled by them.” Several months in the Jim Crow army camps of France strengthened Charles’s resolve to fight racial injustice.
In April 1919, Charles Houston left the army. “My battleground,” he declared, is “in America, not France.” Following his military discharge, 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 his Bachelor of Laws degree 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.
In 1929, Mordecai Johnson, the first Black president of Howard University, named Charles Houston to head the law school. Houston strove to make Howard into the sort of intellectually rigorous center of learning he saw at Harvard. As vice-dean and later Dean of Howard University Law School (1929-35), Houston shaped the school into a significant institution, at the time training almost a quarter of the nation's African American law students. It was perhaps the first “public interest law school.” Houston used his position at the law school to impart to his students a vision for dismantling legalized segregation. Professor Charles 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. Houston told first-year students—as he had been told at Harvard--to “look to your left and look to your right—next year one of you won’t be here.”
During his tenure the school became accredited by the Association of American Law Schools and the American Bar Association. This meant that Howard's graduates earned degrees from a law school recognized as meeting national professional standards. The ABA's approval of Howard Law School did not automatically make Howard graduates members of the ABA. The ABA accredited law schools, but individual lawyers still had to apply for membership, and for many years Black attorneys faced discrimination within local and state bar associations that often controlled professional opportunities. When the American Bar Association refused entry to African American attorneys, he helped to organize the National Bar Association, an all-Black organization, that was founded in 1925, by Black lawyers including George H. Woodson and others. Houston successfully persuaded the ABA to recognize Howard Law School as meeting the same standards as elite White law schools, while at the same time many African American lawyers still encountered racial barriers within the profession itself.
After graduating from Harvard Law School Charles Hamilton Houston returned to Washington, D.C., and joined the law practice of his father, William Le Pre Houston. Later, Houston and his former student and protégé, William H. Hastie, practiced together. Hastie graduated from Howard Law in 1930 and joined the faculty shortly thereafter. The two men worked closely both academically and legally. 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 began bringing to the school for lecture programs nationally recognized civil rights figures such as Arthur Garfield Hays and Clarence Darrow. 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. Houston served as vice dean and then dean of Howard Law School from roughly 1929 to 1935.
Houston’s efforts to elevate the status of Howard encouraged many promising Black students to enroll. One of the most promising new students was a gangling young man from Baltimore named Thurgood Marshall. entered Howard University School of Law in 1930 and graduated first in his class in 1933. Houston hammered into Marshall and all other Howard students the need to understand the workings of government and how they affected racial issues. Houston used his position at the law school to impart to his students a vision for dismantling legalized segregation. His teaching and his strategy would have great effect. Under Houston's rigorous instruction, Marshall became one of his most promising students. After graduating, Marshall became Houston's protégé in a very practical sense. The two traveled throughout the South investigating segregated schools, interviewing plaintiffs, preparing lawsuits, and building the legal strategy that eventually culminated in cases such as Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada and, years later, Brown v. Board of Education.
Houston’s legal accomplishments eventually captured the attention of Walter White, the chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Houston’s proposed campaign to attack segregation in education impressed NAACP leaders, who appointed Houston special counsel in the summer of 1935. This move provided Houston with an opportunity to begin to implement the legal strategy he designed to combat segregation. On a rainy summer night, Houston boarded a train in Washington, set to begin a new phase in his remarkable life. A towering intellectual, Houston was one of the principal legal and social architects of the litigation campaign that developed into the work of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. His NAACP responsibilities became so extensive that he relucuntaly left Howard to devote himself primarily to civil rights litigation. 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.
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. 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. Charles Hamilton Houston wanted the complete eliminate of discrimination. He brought into the campaign the brightest and best young lawyers. Houston wrote to Thurgood Marshall, asking for another full-time lawyer in the national office, which Marshall eagerly accepted. 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 years between 1916 and 1920, however, saw a concerted effort to recruit new Black members in every region of the country. 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. He believed that, given the realities of Jim Crow, strong Black schools, businesses, and organizations could serve as bases for racial advancement. Du Bois was questioning whether complete integration should always be the immediate objective. Houston disagreed.
By the mid-1930s, his legal work for the NAACP had become so extensive that he left the deanship to serve as the organization's first special counsel. Houston began arguing significant constitutional cases before the Supreme Court of the United States during this general period, though most of his most famous Supreme Court victories came after he stepped down as dean. He viewed the oppressed condition of Black Americans, and others, as intolerable, and the struggle as indivisible. 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. He protested the decision by the Daughters of the American Revolution to bar Marian Anderson from singing in Constitution Hall. He pushed for the expulsion from the Senate of the rabid segregationist Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi. Houston staged an integrated swim in a District of Columbia pool to protest the segregated recreational facilities.
Before a frontal attack on segregation could be made, favorable precedents must be established. Big trees in the legal forest such as Plessy fell only when their roots became so weakened that they could no longer sustain the weight. Houston believed that the NAACP “cannot depend upon the judges to fight…our battles.” The campaign would be a long one. Poor Whites would have to be made to understand the justice of the Blacks’ position and how their cause might advance common interests. The propositions put forward by the NAACP would have to be viewed not as African American's propositions, but as those of “all the poor people of this country, Black and White alike.” According to Houston, “The social and public factors must be developed along with and, if possible, before the actual litigation commences.” Charles Houston chose to focus first on segregation in the graduate and professional schools of state universities.
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. Judge Didwiddle issued his decision dismissing the petition of Gaines. Houston announced that the decision would be appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court. Two months later a unanimous Missouri Supreme Court affirmed Judge Dinwiddie’s decision. With the decision of the Missouri Supreme Court, the case of Gaines became the right challenge at the right time. The NAACP petitioned the United State Supreme Court to consider the Gaines appeal. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes announced the Court’s decision in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Registrar of the University of Missouri on December 12, 1938. The Missouri Supreme Court had erred. Missouri had violated the right of Lloyd Gaines to the equal protection of the laws. Missouri had to provide Gaines, with a legal education. Since, Missouri did not have a law school for Black students, Gaines had to be admitted to the all-White University of Missouri, which had the state’s only public law school. Charles Houston told the press that Gaines would open up new opportunities for Blacks in the sixteen states that barred them from professional schools.
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 case of "Shelly v. Kraemer", the court ruled that "judicial enforcement of private right constitutes state action for the purpose of the 14th amendment."
Each successful case created new precedents that weakened segregation’s legal foundation. Houston viewed the oppressed condition of Black Americans, Native Americans, colonized Africans, and others, as intolerable, and the struggle as indivisible. He spent his life fighting for a change in the conditions and quality of life for oppressed Afro-Americans. As for the Black people in America, Charles Hamilton Houston's legacy is more than the foundation he laid for the historic 1954 Brown v Board decision. It is, perhaps most importantly, the challenge he addressed to Black people based upon his years of struggle and understandings gleaned from those years. 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.
In the years before his death, Charles Houston continued to devote much of his attention to what he saw as the most critical battle of the time, the fight to integrate American schools. World War II had made Blacks more militant and many Whites more receptive to the idea of integration. By mid-1947, Houston decided the time was right for “a direct, open, all-out fight against segregation”. There is, Houston declared, “no such thing as ‘separate but equal.’ Segregation itself imports inequality.” With his energy waning and time running out, Houston passed the torch to Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP associates. “These education cases are now tight sufficiently,” Houston declared in a letter to Robert L. Carter. “You and Thurgood can proceed without any fear of crossing any plans that I may have.” Charles Houston died on April 22, 1950, at the too-young age of 54, 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. 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