Charles H. Houston

Charles Hamilton Houston had a simple but well-thought strategy to fight and dismantle the Jim Crow “separate but equal” rules as they related to segregation in public schools and housing.

"All right, if you want it separate but equal, I will make it so expensive for it to be separate that you will have to abandon your separateness," Houston told his opponents.   

And with that declaration, Houston and his team of African-American lawyers — including Thurgood Marshall, his former law student and future U.S. Supreme Court justice — slowly began to chisel away the layers of Jim Crow racial discrimination and separatism, and demand equalization for teacher salaries, school facilities and provisions, and housing for African-Americans.

 

For public education, he used the separate but equal theory to force southern districts to either build equal facilities for black and white students or integrate the existing facilities.

Brown v. Board of Education

In 1954, four years after his death, the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling prohibited segregation in public schools. His tireless work to end discrimination and protect the civil rights of all people led the public to refer to Houston as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.”

The grandson of a slave and the son of a successful attorney, Houston was born and raised in Washington, D.C. In 1915, he graduated Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he was selected to the Phi Betta Kappa honor society. The only black student in his graduating class, he was also its valedictorian. He returned to Washington, D.C. upon graduation and briefly taught undergraduate classes at Howard University before joining the Army in 1917 during World War I; he served as a First Lieutenant until 1919.

While in the military, he dealt with extreme segregation and prejudice among soldiers, spurring his desire to practice law once he was discharged. “The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them,” Houston said. “I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.”

He entered Harvard Law School in 1919 and was the first black student chosen to the editorial board of the Harvard Review. He graduated cum laude from Harvard with a bachelor’s of law degree in 1922 and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1923.

He later became the dean of the Howard University Law School and the first special counsel for the NAACP.

Houston firmly believed that the law be used to fight racial discrimination, and he played a role in every civil rights case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court between 1930 and when he died in 1950 from a heart attack at age 54. Lawyers, he believed, are “either a social engineer or a parasite on society.”