Charles Hamilton Houston
By
John C Abercrombie
Charles Hamilton Houston was a giant in the world of civil rights, but all too often is not mentioned for his significant contributions.
Born September 3, 1895 in Washington, DC he served as Dean of Howard University School of Law, the first Special Counsel or Litigation Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Houston played a significant role in dismantling Jim Crow Laws and was particularly effective in the area of school desegregation and housing covenants. During the height of Jim Crow laws, many real estate contracts forbade the sale of properties to Blacks.
Hamilton attended the segregated Dunbar High School in Washington, DC. However, because of the difficulty in obtaining employment caused by the racially discriminatory practices inherent in the system of the day, the teachers at Dunbar were highly educated and included Ph.D.’s and other advanced degree teachers.
In the videos, books and value items later in this post is a link to a fascinating book on the phenomenally successful classes from Dunbar High School, you will be amazed!
After graduating from the famed Dunbar High School, he attended Amherst College in, the only Black student in the class, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society and graduated as valedictorian.
As the United States entered World War I, Houston as many other Blacks entered the United States Army. Houston with his education was an officer. He served with the famed 369th “Harlem Hellfighters” and saw action in France. There is a post on amazingblackhistory.com about this famed unit.
The experience in war was not a good one and Houston wrote the following about that experience: “The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense of my dying for a world ruled by them. 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.”
A post featured on amazingblackhistory.com featured the heroics of Waverly B Woodson. His story is featured in the book “Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, At Home and At War”. Documents show Woodson’s commanding officer recommended him for the distinguished Service Cross, which is the 2nd highest military award, however, the office of General John D H Lee believed Woodson had earned the more distinguished Medal of Honor award.
When the determined Houston returned, following the war, he enrolled in Harvard Law School. Became the first Black student elected to the editorial board of the prestigious Harvard Law Review and graduated cum Laude. He earned his Bachelor of Law in 1922 and his JD in 1923. He then received the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship to study at the University of Madrid. He then returned, was admitted to the Washington, DC bar and joined his father’s practice.
Black lawyers were refused admission to the American Bar Association. They then formed the National Bar Association. Houston was a founding member of the Washington Bar Association. During these days, most White associations refused Black members admission and the Blacks were forced to form their own associations.
Houston left Howard in 1935 to serve as special counsel for the NAACP. There, he created litigation strategies to attack racial housing covenants and segregated schools. He argued several cases before the United States Supreme Court and played a role in almost every civil rights case that reached the court between 1930 and the Brown v Board of Education case, although he died before litigation of Brown.
As previously discussed, the concept of “separate but equal” was established in the “Plessy v Ferguson” case in 1897. That ruling made it legal to provide separate facilities, but the fallacy of that was that equal never was equal. In fact, it was dramatically different. Houston’s strategy was to attack segregation by demonstrating the inequality. Houston focused on a campaign to force districts to build facilities for Blacks that were equal to those of Whites or integrate the facilities.
Houston came up with the idea that unequal education was the root of Jim Crow. He worked to show that states failed to make minimal effort to live up to the “Separate but Equal” doctrine and use that to overturn the Plessy v Ferguson ruling that had started Jim Crow in the first place.
Targeted were the Southern states which spent less than half of available money for White students on Black students. Black schools were equipped with hand me down supplies from White schools, the construction was deficient. This is evident in the fact that while some of the White schools still stand today because of the quality of construction, few if any Black schools stand today.
In the beginning he concentrated on law schools. Why? Because they were mostly attended by males and as such, he would not have to obviate the fears of Whites who feared that integration would lead to interracial dating and marriage.
One of the most widely known cases in this category was Gaines v Canada. He In this case the Registrar at the Law School of the University of Missouri, Silas Woodson Canada (hence the name Canada), refused admission to Lloyd Gaines because he was Black. At the time, there was no law school in the state that Blacks could attend. The State of Missouri offered to pay Gains tuition in another state, but he refused the offer, citing the 14th amendment.
The court ruling held that state’s that provide training must provide it to every qualified person. It can neither send them to other states, nor condition that training for one group of people, such as Blacks, on levels of demand from that group.
Houston was a man who believed in the excellence of Black people and fought his battles with that in mind and the strategy proved successful. Most of the people in the vanguard of the civil rights fight in the Brown and other influential cases were students of his, including Thurgood Marshall.
At the time he started work as Vice Dean and later Dean of the Howard University School of Law, most of the Black attorneys were educated there and attended night school. This was necessary because there were no scholarships and people had to support themselves with a job during the day. Houston’s father was a lawyer who had attended Night Classes at Howard. There was one problem with the program, it was not accredited.
Despite many opinions to the contrary, Houston made many changes on the road to accreditation. He dismissed poor performing students and teachers, brought in many distinguished lecturers and faculty. He did away with the night classes, but he got full accreditation for the school of law.
Quality was the very root of his work and he often worked 20 hour days. His motto was to outperform and be prepared at all times. Houston was posthumously awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1950. The main building at the Howard University School of Law was dedicated to him as the Charles Hamilton Houston Hall in 1958.
He became more widely known because of the success of his student Thurgood Marshall and a 1983 publication of Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights by Genna Rae McNeil.
Houston is the namesake of the Charles Houston Bar Association and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, which opened in the fall of 2005. In addition, there is a professorship at Harvard Law named after him.
There are some detailed videos for you below. Many of them show video from the trial.
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Of particular interest to me is the Spartanburg, South Carolina collection with Charles Hamilton Houston. He was stationed there briefly at the beginning of World War I. He was a member of the 15th New York, which became the 369th, known more popularly as “The Harlem Hellfighters”.
Spartanburg did not give a warm welcome to the Black troops. In fact, the mayor wrote the United States War department saying that they would not help protect the troops. These troops distinguished themselves in combat, serving longer in the battle than any other unit, receiving more medals, yet they were greeted with segregationist signs making sure that they did not even mingle with White Troops.
Houston says that the French were very welcoming, the problem came from the American White troops who told the French that the Black troops would kill, steal and rape. That they were monkeys and had tails.
This experience is what inspired Charles Hamilton Houston to become knowledgeable in the law so he could speak for those who could not speak of themselves! Always look for a way to solve problems, these are people who make the world better. Look at what you can do, make a plan and take action!
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The legacy of Charles Hamilton Houston
Charles Hamilton Houston ’22 S.J.D. ’23 was an inspiring figure in American legal history, and a sometimes controversial one, as well. On the anniversary of Houston’s birth, HLS professors Randall Kennedy and Kenneth Mack ’91 examined both sides of his legacy and discussed his role as one of the key champions of racial justice in the 20th century.
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Charles Hamilton Houston & World War I
Before Charles Hamilton Houston became the chief attorney for the NAACP and a mentor to Thurgood Marshall, he was a young officer serving in a segregated military during the First World War. Curator Ryan Reft discusses Houston’s wartime experiences and their influence on his later work.
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The injustices of 1940s Jim Crow America are brought to life in this extraordinary blend of military and social history—a story that pays tribute to the valor of an all-black battalion whose crucial contributions at D-Day have gone unrecognized to this day. In the early hours of June 6, 1944, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit of African-American soldiers, landed on the beaches of France. Their orders were to man a curtain of armed balloons meant to deter enemy aircraft. One member of the 320th would be nominated for the Medal of Honor, an award he would never receive. The nation’s highest decoration was not given to black soldiers in World War II.
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Charles Hamilton Houston – The man who killed Jim Crow
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Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights
“A classic. . . . [It] will make an extraordinary contribution to the improvement of race relations and the understanding of race and the American legal process.”—Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., from the Foreword Charles Hamilton Houston (1895-1950) left an indelible mark on American law and society. A brilliant lawyer and educator, he laid much of the legal foundation for the landmark civil rights decisions of the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the lawyers who won the greatest advances for civil rights in the courts, Justice Thurgood Marshall among them, were trained by Houston in his capacity as dean of the Howard University Law School. Politically Houston realized that blacks needed to develop their racial identity and also to recognize the class dimension inherent in their struggle for full civil rights as Americans.
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The Man who Ended Jim Crow, Charles H. Houston~ Brown v Board of Ed Topeka
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Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston,
Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation The riveting story of the two crusading lawyers who led the legal battle to end segregation, one case and one courtroom at a time. The Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education is widely considered a seminal point in the battle to end segregation, but it was in fact the culmination of a decades-long legal campaign. Root and Branch is the epic story of the two fiercely dedicated lawyers who led the fight from county courthouses to the marble halls of the Supreme Court, and, in the process, laid the legal foundations of the civil rights movement.
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Dr. Genna Rae McNeil – The Legacy of Charles Hamilton Houston (Part 1/3)
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Undoing Plessy: Charles Hamilton Houston, Race, Labor, and the Law, 1895-1950
Undoing Plessy: Charles Hamilton Houston, Race, Labor and the Law, 1895-1950 explores the manner in which African Americans countered racialized impediments, attacking their legal underpinnings during the first half of the twentieth century.
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Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation (Studies in Constitutional Democracy)
In 1936, Lloyd Gaines’s application to the University of Missouri law school was denied based on his race. Gaines and the NAACP challenged the university’s decision. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first in a long line of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding race, higher education, and equal opportunity. The court case drew national headlines, and the NAACP moved Gaines to Chicago after he received death threats.Before he could attend law school, he vanished.
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Professor Laura McNeal – The Legacy of Charles Hamilton Houston (Part 3/3)
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Charles Hamilton Houston was a man of amazing accomplishment. He was the focus of so much in the area of Civil Rights and what he did not do himself, his students did. Yet, history has excluded him and other people that belong in the story of history. Amazingblackhistory.com is your source for inspiring stories of accomplishment by people who deserve to be known.