DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall
Launching the legal challenge to segregation
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
In November 1956, a black-instigated boycott of the segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, had entered its 12th month. A year earlier, a black woman named Rosa Parks had bravely refused to relinquish her front seat on a municipal bus to a white man, launching a political movement and introducing Americans to a courageous and dynamic leader — the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But it was not until the courts forbade the relegation of African Americans to the back of the bus that the city of Montgomery yielded and the boycott succeeded. As historian Kevin Mumford has written: “Without constitutional legitimacy and the promise of protection from the courts, local black protesters would be crushed by state and local officials, and white segregationists could easily prevail.”
Americans often refer to the mid-20th-century social justice campaigns led by King and others as the civil rights movement. As we have seen, however, African Americans and their allies had long struggled to achieve the rights promised them by the U.S. Constitution and its post-Civil War amendments. It is important also to understand that the modern civil rights movement rested on two pillars. One was formed by the brave nonviolent protesters who forced their fellow Americans at last to confront squarely the scandalous treatment of black Americans. The second consisted of attorneys such as Charles Hamilton Houston and his greatest student, Thurgood Marshall, who ensured that those protestors would have the United States’ most powerful force — the law of the land — on their side.
Marshall, the attorney who argued for Montgomery’s blacks in 1956, relied on legal precedents he had established in other successful court cases. Brown v. Board of Education was the most celebrated, but even before Brown, the partnership between Houston and Marshall had dismantled much of the legal structure by which the American South had enforced its Jim Crow system of race segregation.
