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29 December 2008
Charles Hamilton Houston: The Man Who Killed Jim Crow
Skilled litigator and legal educator launches the assault on 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).
Charles Hamilton Houston was born in 1895 in Washington, D.C. A brilliant student, he graduated as a valedictorian from Amherst College at the age of 19, then served in a segregated U.S. Army unit during the First World War. After his brush with racism in the Army, Houston determined to make the fight for civil rights his life’s calling. Returning home, he studied law at Harvard University, becoming the first African-American editor of its prestigious law review. He would go on to earn a PhD in juridical science at Harvard and a doctor of civil law degree at the University of Madrid in Spain.
Houston believed that an attorney’s proper vocation was to wield the law as an instrument for securing justice. “A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society,” he argued. In 1924, Houston began teaching part time at Howard University Law School, the Washington, D.C. institution responsible by some accounts for training fully three-fourths of the African-American attorneys then practicing. By 1929, Houston headed 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 law. In the book Black Profiles, George R. Metcalf writes that Houston took the job to turn Howard into “a West Point [a popular name for the United States Military Academy] of Negro leadership, so that Negroes could gain equality by fighting segregation in the courts.”
Meanwhile, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was laying the groundwork for a legal challenge to the separate-but-equal doctrine approved in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy decision. On Houston’s recommendation, the organization engaged former U.S. Attorney Nathan Ross Margold to study the practical workings of separate but equal in the South. Margold’s report — 218 legal-sized-pages long — was completed in 1931. It documented woeful inequality in state expenditures between white and black segregated schools.
In 1934, Houston accepted the position of NAACP special counsel. He surrounded himself with a select group of young, mostly Howard-trained lawyers, among them James Nabrit, Spottswood Robinson III, A. Leon Higginbotham, Robert Carter, William Hastie, George E.C. Hayes, Jack Greenberg, and Oliver Hill. With his young protégé Thurgood Marshall often in tow, Houston began to tour the South, armed with a camera and a portable typewriter. Marshall later recalled that he and Houston traveled in Houston’s car: “There was no place to eat, no place to sleep. We slept in the car and we ate fruit.” This could be dangerous work, but the visual record Houston compiled and the data amassed by Margold would anchor a new legal strategy: If the facilities allocated to blacks were not equal to those afforded whites, Houston reasoned, segregationist states were not meeting even the Plessy standard. Separate but equal logically required those states either to improve drastically the black facilities, a hugely expensive undertaking, or else integrate.
This equalization strategy bore fruit in 1935, when Houston and Marshall prevailed in a Maryland case, Murray v. Pearson. The African-American plaintiff challenged his rejection by the segregated University of Maryland law school. The university’s lawyers argued that the school met the separate but equal requirement by granting qualified black applicants scholarships to enroll at out-of-state law schools. The state courts rejected this argument. While they were not yet prepared to rule against segregated public schools, they did hold that Maryland’s out-of-state option was not an equal opportunity. Maryland’s law school was ordered to admit qualified African-American students. The triumph was especially sweet for Marshall, who numbered himself among the qualified blacks rejected by the school.
Houston retired from the NAACP in 1940 because of ill health, and he died in 1950. “We owe it all to Charlie,” Marshall later remarked. While Houston’s prize student would lead the final legal assault on segregation, it was Houston, the teacher, who devised the strategy and illuminated the path.
