Houston, Charles Hamilton

Houston, Charles Hamilton 1895-1950

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Charles Hamilton Houston was born in 1895, one year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. In Plessy, the Court upheld laws requiring racially segregated public facilities, known as Jim Crow laws, ruling that “separate but equal” facilities for blacks and whites did not violate the U.S. Constitution. Charles Houston dedicated his life to destroying Jim Crow and ending racial segregation by law in the United States.

Houston believed that the law could be used to bring about social change and that black lawyers should be trained as social engineers. He attended law school at Harvard University, where he was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. In 1929 Houston was appointed head of the law school at Howard University, a historically black institution. Houston raised admissions standards, improved the faculty, strengthened the curriculum, and achieved accreditation for the school. His mission was to train a cadre of black lawyers that would successfully challenge government-sanctioned discrimination. One of Houston’s students, Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993), went on to argue Brown v. Board of Education (1954) before the U.S. Supreme Court and later to serve as the Court’s first black justice.

In 1935 Houston took a leave of absence from the law school to serve as special counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Within a few months of joining the NAACP, Houston initiated a legal campaign to end racial discrimination in public education. The first step in Houston’s strategy was to attack Plessy ’s “separate but equal” doctrine as it applied to graduate and professional schools. Most states offered legal education only to white students, thus failing to meet the “separate” requirement, and Houston brought test cases to challenge these policies. In Murray v. Maryland (1936) and Missouri ex. rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), the Maryland Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states must either admit black students to their established institutions or provide blacks with equal facilities for graduate and professional training.

Houston resigned as NAACP special counsel in 1938, but he remained active in civil rights litigation. He turned his attention to racial discrimination in labor and housing. In the Steele and Tunstall cases of 1944, Houston successfully challenged preferential hiring in the railroad industry, and in Hurd v. Hodge (1948), he took on restrictive covenants among homeowners and prevailed.

Houston also continued to advise Thurgood Marshall, who had taken over the education litigation. The next step was to challenge the separate graduate and professional schools created in the wake of Murray and Gaines and to show that equality was impossible, or at least too expensive, to achieve. In Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma (1950), the NAACP argued that the education offered to black law and graduate students was substantially inferior to that available to white students, and the Supreme Court unanimously agreed.

Houston died of heart failure in 1950 and did not live to see the culmination of his strategy to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and its companion cases, the Supreme Court was unanimous in striking down segregation in primary and secondary education, declaring that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.”

SEE ALSO Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 ; Marshall, Thurgood; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Klebanow, Diana, and Franklin L. Jonas. 2003. People’s Lawyers: Crusaders for Justice in American History. Armonk, NY: Sharpe.

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

Malia Reddick