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Charles Hamilton Houston, a leading African American civil rights lawyer and legal educator, was born on September 3, 1895. He graduated as a valedictorian from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1915. After teaching at Howard University in Washington, D.C., for two years, he served as a U.S. Army officer in World War I. During the war he witnessed widespread discrimination against black soldiers, leading him to the conclusion that racial discrimination and segregation had to be attacked through the legal system. Accordingly, in 1919 he enrolled at Harvard University and, after completing a doctorate in law in 1923, entered private practice while returning to Howard University to teach part-time in the law school. In 1929 he was named vice-dean of the law school, though he was dean in all but title. In 1935 he moved to New York City to become litigation director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). That year, in an article in the Crisis titled "Educational Inequalities Must Go!," he announced the NAACP's strategy of attacking racial segregation by focusing on public education. In 1938 he returned to private practice in Washington, D.C., where he focused on civil rights litigation. Following his early death on April 22, 1950, he was eulogized by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as the driving force behind the legal challenges that dismantled the Jim Crow system of racial segregation the U.S. Supreme Court had sanctioned in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Houston argued numerous important cases in the U.S. Supreme Court that dealt with such issues as education, criminal procedure, and racial discrimination in housing. In Hollins v. Oklahoma (1935), the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of an African American accused of rape because African Americans had been systematically excluded from juries in that state. In Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada (1938), the Court opened the University of Missouri's law school to a black student, thus paving the way for subsequent challenges to racial segregation in schools, which culminated in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In Hurd v. Hodge (1948) (along with Shelley v. Kraemer that same year), the Court struck down the legal enforceability of private restrictive covenants that prevented racial minorities from occupying property they had purchased. Houston also argued numerous cases in the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Charles Hamilton Houston devoted his professional life to finding ways to use the legal system to attack racial inequality. He mounted that attack on two fronts. One was to improve the status of African Americans in the legal system by increasing the number of black lawyers--and in general by promoting educational opportunities for blacks. The other was to challenge racial inequality in the courts. An example of the first was his article "Educational Inequalities Must Go!" published in the NAACP's monthly journal Crisis in 1935. Examples of the second include his arguments in two Supreme Court case briefs: Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada (1938), his petition for the Court to hear a case to integrate the University of Missouri; and Hurd v. Hodge (1948), to prohibit the enforcement of covenants barring African Americans from living in property they had purchased in the District of Columbia.

References:

1. Greenberg, Jack. Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

2. Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. 2 vols. New York: Knopf, 1975.

3. McNeil, Genna Rae. Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.

4. Tushnet, Mark V. The NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925-1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

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