Charles Hamilton Houston

Charles Hamilton Houston was born in Washington, D.C., on the third of September 1895, the son of a Howard-trained attorney. He took his undergraduate degree at Amherst (Phi Beta Kappa, valedictorian) in 1915, served as a segregated U.S. Army first lieutenant in the First World War, and entered Harvard Law School in 1919.

At Harvard he became the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review, took his LL.B. in 1922 and his S.J.D. (Doctor of Juridical Science) in 1923 — the first African American to earn a doctorate in law from Harvard. He undertook further graduate study in civil law at the University of Madrid.

He joined the Howard University School of Law faculty in 1924 and served as Dean and Vice Dean from 1929 to 1935. In those six years he restructured Howard Law from an evening program with no national reputation into a fully accredited, ABA-approved, AALS-member institution — the principal training ground for the Black civil-rights bar of the twentieth century. He personally taught nearly every African American lawyer who would argue the major civil-rights cases of the next thirty years; he was Thurgood Marshall's professor and mentor.

He left Howard in 1935 to become the first Special Counsel of the NAACP. He designed the litigation strategy — incremental challenges to graduate-school segregation that built precedent for an eventual assault on K-12 segregation — that produced Murray v. Pearson (1936), Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), and ultimately Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which Marshall argued four years after Houston's death.

He died of a heart attack at Freedmen's Hospital in Washington on the twenty-second of April 1950, age fifty-four.

He is honored here as the architect of the legal strategy that dismantled American legal segregation.