Charles Hamilton Houston:

A Visionary on Racial Equality

By Mildred Solá Neely

Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall's mentor and law school professor, was the brilliant thinker who crafted the strategy that ended legalized segregation in the United States. The litigation campaign Houston launched to reverse the Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling on "separate but equal" facilities paved the way for Marshall's triumph in Brown vs. Board of Education.

Houston firmly believed in the power of law to create social change. Through the years following Plessy, African Americans were conscious that existing "separate but equal" schools - with shoddy facilities, frequent overcrowding, and fewer or no books and supplies — short-changed their children. Houston persuaded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that it could end discrimination in education if the organization's court cases succeeded in making it too expensive to maintain segregation with "equality."

The string of cases that Houston and then Marshall won as attorneys for the NAACP confirmed Houston's analysis. Nearly a century after the Civil War, Brown gave African Americans access to improved educational opportunities. This includes the opportunity of attending the top colleges and universities in the United States, the ticket to a better life for many Americans, both black and white.

Houston was born in 1895 in Washington, D.C. He was only 19 when he graduated from Amherst College and went on to serve in World War I in a segregated U.S. Army unit. He studied law at Harvard University, becoming the first African-American editor of its prestigious law review. Houston also earned a Ph.D. in juridical science at Harvard and a doctor of civil law degree at the University of Madrid in Spain.

By 1924, Houston was back in Washington, working part time teaching at the law school of Howard University, a historically black institution. Howard hired him in 1929 to head the law school. In just six years, Houston radically improved the education of African-American law students, earned full accreditation for the school, and produced a group of lawyers trained in civil rights. In the book Black Profiles, George R. Metcalf said that Houston took the job to turn Howard into "a West Point of Negro leadership, so that Negroes could gain equality by fighting segregation in the courts."

While at Howard University's law school, Marshall recalled that Houston "made it clear to all of us that when we were done, we were expected to go out and do something with our lives."

In 1935, Houston became special counsel to the NAACP, and surrounded himself with a select group of young lawyers, mostly from Howard. This team - which included Marshall — began winning court case after court case before the Supreme Court. These racial discrimination cases - on issues ranging from the death penalty to housing — were carefully chosen by Houston to erode the legal underpinnings of segregation.

After undertaking one of the cases that became part of Brown, Houston's failing health forced him to resign from the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. Thurgood Marshall was his successor.

Houston died on April 22, 1950, four years before his star pupil won in Brown vs. Board of Education.

At his funeral, Houston's colleague at Howard, William Hastie, said in a tear-filled eulogy: "He guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class citizenship. He was truly the Moses of that journey."

Mildred Solá Neely is a staff editor and writer with the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Information Programs.

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