Charles Hamilton Houston

Born in Washington, DC, in 1895, Houston enrolled in Amherst College in Massachusetts at the age of 16, the only Black student in his class. He earned his bachelor’s degree, magna cum laude, in 1915 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After returning home to teach at Howard University for two years, Houston served in the then-segregated U.S. Army as an officer, including time in France during World War I. Houston would later recall of his service, in a series of essays written in 1940 in the lead up to the United States’ entry into World War II:

Houston flourished at Harvard Law School, earning top grades and a coveted position on the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review — the first Black student to do so, decades before future-US President Barack Obama became the first Black person elected president of the prestigious journal. Houston’s confidence and exemplary work caught the attention of Professor Felix Frankfurter (LL.B. 1906) — later an associate Supreme Court justice — and Dean Roscoe Pound (Hon. LL.D. 1920). He also won the respect of his fellow students, and many of his Black classmates saw him as a leader.

Houston earned a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) in 1922 and his Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) in 1923 — the first year that Harvard awarded the degree, making Houston the school’s first Black S.J.D. graduate. With support from his professors, Houston secured a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, which he used to continue his studies and earn a Doctor of Civil Laws degree from the University of Madrid.

Houston’s experiences of injustice both at home and abroad prompted him to join his father’s law practice upon his return to Washington, DC. Renamed Houston & Houston, it was one of the first Black law firms established in the district. Houston believed that it was incumbent upon Black lawyers to fight for Black people and Black communities because, he wrote in 1935, “experience has proved that the average white lawyer, especially in the South, cannot be relied upon to wage an uncompromising fight for equal rights for Negroes.” When the American Bar Association refused admission to Black lawyers, Houston and others founded the Washington, DC-based National Bar Association for Black attorneys.

He also taught part-time at Howard Law School during this period. In 1929, Howard’s first Black president, Mordecai Johnson, appointed Houston to serve as the law school’s vice-dean in name, while in fact he fulfilled many of the responsibilities of dean. Houston led the Howard Law School’s transformation from an unaccredited part-time evening program into what legal scholar and former Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund Jack Greenberg later described as the “West Point of civil rights training.”

Houston’s protégés at Howard included a litany of future civil rights heroes, including Thurgood Marshall, who would later found the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and become the first Black justice of the United States Supreme Court, and Oliver W. Hill, who worked with Marshall to win the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education that made segregated, “separate but equal” schools unlawful. Their success was not only a matter of rigorous training from Houston; the Brown victory was also built upon legal foundations laid out by Houston in his own successfully argued cases.

Houston left Howard in 1935 to serve as the NAACP’s first general counsel, establishing a precursor to Marshall’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He made it his mission to disprove the fallacy of “separate but equal” and launched a nationwide campaign by Black lawyers to expose the glaring inequities that Black Americans faced in all aspects of their lives, particularly education. To make his case and attract people to his cause, Houston traveled throughout the South documenting these inequities on film and delivered speeches across the nation, arguing that,

In 2005, Harvard Law School professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., launched the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. The center not only honors Houston but also continues his unfinished work combatting discrimination and securing equal rights and opportunity. As Houston himself reflected in a recording made near the end of his life, “It is necessary to establish the principle of the indivisibility of liberty, so that the masses recognize that no matter where liberty is challenged, no matter where oppression lifts its head, it becomes the business of all the masses.” He went on,