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Charles Hamilton Houston

(1895-1950)

Brown@50
Biographical Sketches

Robert
L. Carter
Julian
R. Dugas
Jack
Greenberg
William H.
Hastie
George E. C.
Hayes
A. Leon
Higginbotham
Oliver W.
Hill
Charles
Hamilton Houston
Thurgood
Marshall
William Robert Ming,
Jr.
Constance
Baker Motley
James M.
Nabrit, Jr.
Spottswood
W. Robinson, III

Biography

by Steven D. Jamar

Charles Hamilton Houston conceived of and led the legal
strategy leading to the end of legalized racial segregation in the United
States. He and those he taught and mentored laid the legal groundwork
through thought and action that ultimately led to 1954 U.S. Supreme Court
decision in Brown v.
Board of Education that made racial segregation in public primary
and secondary schools unconstitutional. He died four years before full
fruition of his work to end "separate but equal" as a valid constitutional
principle. Houston not only participated in effecting the change, but was
the inspiration and mentor to Thurgood
Marshall, James
Nabrit, Spottswood
Robinson, A. Leon
Higginbotham, Robert Carter, William
Hastie and many others who carried on the battle and remains an
inspiration to those working for social justice today.

Houston completed high school at the age of 15 and graduated
from as one of six valedictorians from Amherst College in Massachusetts in
1915. He then taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C., for two
years until the onset of World War I. Houston enlisted in the U.S. Army
and served in Europe in World War I as a second lieutenant in field
artillery.

As a result of some of his experiences in the segregated and
racist army, Houston decided that he needed to become an advocate to
enforce the legal rights of the oppressed. In pursuit of this, following
his honorable discharge from the army in 1919, Houston enrolled at Harvard
Law School from which he earned his Bachelor of Laws in 1922 and a
doctorate in 1923. Houston was a stellar student and became the first
black editor of the Harvard Law Review. He studied law at the University
of Madrid until 1924 when he returned to Washington, DC, and joined his
father's law practice.

In 1924 he also began to teach part time at Howard
University School of Law, then a part-time night school. Through that time
HUSL had trained approximately three fourths of the approximately 950
African American lawyers practicing in the United States. Genna Rae
McNeil, Groundwork at 64 (1983). In the next five years, in part
at the urging of Houston, the Howard University Trustees recreated HUSL as
a full-time day school and in 1929 put Houston in charge (with a title of
Resident Vice-Dean, but he had the responsibilities of a dean--Houston was
HUSL's dean in all but title).

During Houston's six year tenure as vice-dean (1929-35),
Howard University Law School was training almost a quarter of the nation's
black law students. Houston also oversaw the dramatic change which led to
HUSL being accredited by the American Bar Association and meeting the
standards for being admitted to the the Association of American Law
Schools. McNeil, Groundwork at 70-71 (1983). It was during this
period that Houston set the course for the law school when he wrote:

[The] Negro lawyer must be trained as a social engineer
and group interpreter. Due to the Negro's social and political condition
. . . the Negro lawyer must be prepared to anticipate, guide and
interpret his group advancement. . . . [Moreover, he must act as]
business advisor . . . for the protection of the scattered resources
possessed or controlled by the group. . . . He must provide more ways
and means for holding within the group the income now flowing through
it.

McNeil, Groundwork at 71 (1983), quoting Charles
Hamilton Houston, "Personal Observations on the Summary of Studies in
Legal Education as Applied to the Howard University School of Law,"
(May 28, 1929).

Houston is recognized as the architect behind the ultimate
success of the long struggle to end legalized discrimination and, in
particular, the "separate but equal" doctrine accepted by the U.S. Supreme
Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. Houston, together with a
select group of mostly Howard lawyers, including Thurgood
Marshall, and working through the NAACP and later the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, created a number of precedents that
ultimately led to the dismantling of de jure discrimination after
Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, four years after his death.
Among the major steps were Pearson
v. Murray (1936) and State
ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1939). In Pearson Houston and
Thurgood Marshall established in the Maryland highest court that the
University of Maryland could not exclude African Americans as it had
excluded Marshall just a few years earlier. In Gaines this
principle was extended to the entire country when the U.S. Supreme Court
held that Missouri could not exclude blacks from the state law school
since there was no comparable, and could be no comparable school for
African Americans because of the unique intangibles of a legal education,
in Missouri. Ultimately this precedent was extended to other schools and
ultimately down to public primary and secondary education.

Houston's importance was recognized by his colleagues,
students, and intellectual heirs. He was posthumously awarded the NAACP's
Spingarn Medal in 1950 and in 1958 the main building of the Howard
University School of Law was dedicated as Charles Hamilton Houston Hall.
His importance became more broadly known through the success of Thurgood
Marshall and after the 1983 publication of Genna Rae McNeil's
Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil
Rights (U. of Pa. Press 1983).

Charles Hamilton Houston's credo guides the Howard
University School of Law's mission to this day:

"A lawyer's either a social engineer or he's a parasite on
society." ... A social engineer was a highly skilled, perceptive,
sensitive lawyer who understood the Constitution of the United States
and knew how to explore its uses in the solving of "problems of . .
. local communities" and in "bettering conditions of the
underprivileged citizens."

McNeil, Groundwork at 84 (1983), quoting
Charles Hamilton Houston (McNeil cites Thurgood Marshall as quoted in
Geraldine Segal, In Any Fight Some Fall at 34 (Mercury Press
1975))

Select Bibliography

The library of the Indiana University School of Law has compiled
a more complete bibliography from which
this bibliography is in substantial part derived.

Books

Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for
Civil Rights (U. of Pa. Press 1983)

Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of
Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (Basic Books 1994)

J. Clay Smith, Jr.,
Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944 (U. of Pa.
Press 1993)

Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP's Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education,
1925-1950 (UNC Press
1987)

Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The
History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle
for Equality (Vintage Books, 1977)

Articles

Charles Hamilton Houston Commemorative Issue,
32 How. L. J. (1989)

Leland Ware, A Difference in Emphasis: Charles Houston's
Transformation of Legal Education, 32 How. L. J. 479 (1989)

J. Clay
Smith, Jr., Principles Supplementing the Houstonian School of
Jurisprudence: Occasional Paper No. 1, 32 How. L. J. 493
(1989)

Steven H. Hobbs, From the Shoulders of Houston: a Vision for
Social and Economic Justice, 32 How. L. J. 505 (1989)

Herbert O.
Reid, Introduction, 32 How. L. J. x (1989)

Genna Rae
McNeil, Charles Hamilton Houston: 1895-1950, 32 How. L. J.
469 (1989)

Charles Hamilton Houston Symposium, 27 New
England L. Rev. (1993)

John C. Brittain, The Culture of Civil Rights Lawyers: A Tribute to
Justice Thurgood Marshall, 61 Conn. L. Rev. 1 (1992) (including copious
discussion of Charles Hamilton Houston)

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., Reflections
on the Impact of Charles Hamilton Houston - from a Unique
Perspective 27 New England L. Rev. 605(1993)(from 1980 Amherst
College symposium "Men of Amherst: Charles Hamilton Houston Forum")

Nathaniel R. Jones, The Sisyphean
Impact on Houstonian Jurisprudence (attorney Charles Hamilton Houston),
69 U. Cincinnati L. Rev. 435 (2001)

Richard, Kluger, The Legal Scholar Who Plotted the Road to Integrated
Education, J. Blacks in Higher Ed., 66 (Sum. 1994)

Walter J. Leonard, Charles Hamilton Houston and the Search for a
Just Society, 22 N. Carolina Central L. J. 1 (1996)

Jennifer L. Levi, Paving the Road: A
Charles Hamilton Houston Approach to Securing Trans Rights, 7 Wm
& Mary J. Women & the Law 5 (2000)

Genna Rae McNeil,  To Meet
the Group Needs: The Transformation of Howard University School of Law,
1920-1935, in New Perspectives on Black Educational History. (Vincent P.
Franklin and James D. Anderson, eds., G. K. Hall, 1978)

Michael Wilson Reed, The Contribution
of Charles Hamilton Houston to American Jurisprudence, 30 How. L. J. 1095
(1987)

Mark Tushnet, The Politics of Equality in Constitutional Law:  The
Equal Protection Clause, Dr. Du Bois, and Charles Hamilton Houston, 74 J.
Am. History 884 (1987)

Tributes

Robert L. Carter, William T. Coleman Jr.,
Jack Greenberg, Genna Rae McNeil, J. Clay Smith Jr, In Tribute: Charles
Hamilton Houston, 111 Harv. L. Rev. 2148 (1998) (5
testimonials)

Roger A. Fairfax, Jr., Wielding the
Double-edged Sword: Charles Hamilton Houston and Judicial Activism in the Age
of Legal Realism, 14 Harv. Blackletter L.J. 17 (1998) (A Tribute
to Charles Hamilton Houston)

J. Clay
Smith Jr., E. Desmond Hogan, Remembered Hero, Forgotten Contribution:
Charles Hamilton Houston, Legal Realism, and Labor Law, 14 Harv.
Blackletter L.J. 1 (1998) (A Tribute to Charles Hamilton
Houston)

Additional information available on the web

http://www.law.howard.edu/chashouston.htm

http://www.law.cornell.edu/houston/housbio.htm

http://www.britannica.com/blackhistory/micro/727/71.html

http://www.africanpubs.com/Apps/bios/0818HoustonCharles.asp?

http://www.toptags.com/aama/bio/men/chouston.htm

http://indylaw.indiana.edu/glj/houston.htm

© 2004 Steven
D. Jamar
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