Houston, Charles Hamilton

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Houston, Charles Hamilton

September 3, 1895
April 22, 1950

Charles Hamilton Houston, a lawyer, was born in the District of Columbia, the son of William L. Houston, a government worker who attended Howard University Law School and became a lawyer, and Mary Hamilton Houston, a teacher who later worked as a hairdresser. He attended Washington's M Street High School and then went to Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1915, then taught English for two years at Howard University. In 1917 Houston joined the army and served as a second lieutenant in a segregated unit of the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. Following his discharge, he decided on a career in law and entered Harvard Law School. Houston was the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. He received an L.L.B. degree cum laude (1922) and an S.J.D. degree (1923). He received the Sheldon Fellowship for further study in civil law at the University of Madrid (1923–1924).

In 1924 Houston was admitted to the Washington, D.C., bar, and he entered law practice with his father at Houston & Houston in Washington, D.C. (later Houston & Hastie, then Houston, Bryant, and Gardner), where he handled domestic relations, negligence, and personal injury cases, as well as criminal law cases involving civil rights matters. He remained with the firm until his death. Throughout his career Houston served on numerous committees and organizations, including the Washington Board of Education, the National Bar Association, the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Council on Race Relations. He also wrote columns on racial and international issues for The Crisis and the Baltimore Afro-American. In 1932 he was a delegate to the NAACP's second Amenia Conference.

In 1927 and 1928, after receiving a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Houston wrote an important report, "The Negro and His Contact with the Administration of Law." The next year, he was appointed vice dean at Howard University, where he served as professor of law and as head of the law school. He transformed the law program into a full-day curriculum that was approved by both the American Bar Association and the Association of American Law Schools. Houston mentored such students as Thurgood Marshall, William Bryant, and Oliver Hill. Under his direction, Howard Law School became a unique training ground for African-American lawyers to challenge segregation through the legal system.

In 1935 Houston took a leave of absence from Howard to become the first full-time, salaried special counsel of the NAACP. As special counsel Houston argued civil rights cases and traveled to many different areas of the United States, sometimes under trying conditions, in order to defend blacks who stood accused of crimes. He won two important Supreme Court cases, Hollins v. Oklahoma (1935) and Hale v. Kentucky (1938), which overturned death sentences given by juries from which blacks had been excluded because of their race.

Houston persuaded the joint committee of the NAACP and the philanthropic American Fund for Public Service to support an unrelenting but incremental legal struggle against segregation, with public education as the main area of challenge. In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" segregated facilities were constitutional. Houston realized that a direct assault on the decision would fail, so he designed a strategy of litigation of test cases and a slow buildup of successful precedents based on inequality within segregation. He focused on combating discrimination in graduate education, a less controversial area than discrimination in primary schools, as the first step in his battle in the courts. University of Maryland v. Murray was his first victory and an important psychological triumph. The Maryland Supreme Court ordered that Donald Murray, an African American, be admitted to the University of Maryland Law School because there were no law schools for blacks in the state. Two years later, Houston successfully argued Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court ordered that Lloyd Gaines be admitted to the University of Missouri, which had no black graduate school, ruling that granting scholarships for black students to out-of-state schools did not constitute equal admission.

In 1938, suffering from tuberculosis and heart problems, Houston resigned as chief counsel, and two years later he left the NAACP. However, he remained a prime adviser over the next decade through his membership on the NAACP Legal Committee. His position as special counsel was taken over by his former student and deputy Thurgood Marshall, who formed the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (LDF), to continue the struggle Houston had begun. Their endeavor culminated with the famous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which overturned school segregation. Houston remained active in the effort. Shortly before his death, he initiated Bolling v. Sharpe (1954), a school desegregation suit in Washington, D.C., which later became one of the school cases the Supreme Court consolidated with and decided in Brown.

In 1940 Houston became general counsel of the International Association of Railway Employees and of the Association of Colored Railway Trainmen and Locomotive Firemen. He and his co-counsel investigated complaints of unfair labor practices and litigated grievances. Houston successfully argued two cases, Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railroad and Tunstall v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, involving racial discrimination in the selection of bargaining agents under the Railway Labor Act of 1934. Houston also worked as an attorney for hearings of the President's Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). Appointed to the FEPC in 1944, he dramatically resigned in December 1945 in protest over President Truman's refusal to issue an order banning discrimination by Washington's Capital Transit Authority, and of the committee's imminent demise.

In the late 1940s Houston led a group of civil rights lawyers in bringing suit against housing discrimination. He helped draft the brief for the LDF's Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kramer and argued a companion case, Hurd v. Hodge, in which the Supreme Court barred enforcement of racially restrictive covenants in leases.

In 1948 Houston suffered a heart attack, and died of a coronary occlusion two years later. He received the NAACP's Spingarn Medal posthumously in 1950. In 1958 Howard University named its new main law school building in his honor.

Bibliography

Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice. New York: Vintage, 1975.

McNeil, Genna Rae. "'To Meet the Group Needs': The Transformation of Howard University School of Law, 1920–1935." In New Perspectives on Black Educational History, edited by V. P. Franklin and James D. Anderson, pp. 149–172. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.

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

Ogletree, Charles J. All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

Rowan, Carl. Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

Segal, Geraldine. In Any Fight Some Fall. Rockville, Md.: Mercury, 1975.

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

genna rae mcneil (1996)
Updated bibliography

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History