Raising the Bar: Pioneers in the Legal Profession
Black History Month (February)
Charles Hamilton Houston
Charles Hamilton Houston was the visionary who successfully crafted the grand strategic plan in the legal battle for racial equality in America. As a law school dean and as special counsel for the NAACP, he almost single-handedly transformed the education of African-American law students and then rigorously trained them to fight courageously for equal justice.
Born in 1895 in Washington, D.C., Houston was a towering intellectual who graduated from Amherst College when he was only 19 years old. He served in a segregated unit of the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant during World War I.
Upon his discharge, he studied law at Harvard where he was the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating in 1922, Houston stayed on at Harvard to study with Felix Frankfurter, becoming one of the few lawyers at that time to earn a doctor of juridical science, and then won a fellowship to study in Europe, earning a doctor of civil law at the University of Madrid.
In 1924, Houston practiced law in his father's Washington, D.C. firm and taught part-time at Howard Law School. In 1929, he was hired by the president of Howard to raise the school's academic standards and in six years transformed it into a fully accredited institution that would produce an annual crop of ably trained civil rights lawyers.
In 1934, Houston began to work for the NAACP, traveling by automobile at considerable personal risk all over the Deep South on a per diem of five dollars. During this time, he wrote for several newspapers, aiming to educate white readers about the injustice of racial segregation and to inspire African-American readers to oppose it.
As special counsel for the NAACP, he developed the idea of a litigation campaign that would eventually reverse the "separate but equal" doctrine that had fostered inferior schools for African-Americans. The campaign was launched with cases in Southern states where people of color were not allowed to attend state-supported professional and graduate schools. Beginning with Pearson v. Murray, a 1936 case ensuring African-Americans a place in the University of Maryland's law school alongside white students, Houston and his legal team went on to win cases in other states and other types of professional schools. Gaines v. Canada, noted in the first of these profiles, was among these cases.
Unfortunately, Houston died of a heart attack in 1950 at the age of 55 and did not live to see the greatest victory of his 15-year campaign, Brown v. Board of Education. In that 1954 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal and therefore segregated schools violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
At the time of his death, Houston was working on the precursor to the District of Columbia case that became one of the companion cases for Brown. He was assisted by one of his star pupils at Howard, Thurgood Marshall, who would succeed him as chief counsel for the NAACP and would become a Supreme Court Justice in 1967. Houston was buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery and five Supreme Court justices attended his funeral. At his funeral, his cousin William H. Hastie remarked:
He guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class citizenship.
He was truly the Moses of that journey.
