Volume 4, No. 2 (Winter 2001) -- Black History Month Issue

Charles Hamilton Houston, born in Washington, D.C. in 1895, was the first African American to earn a Harvard law degree and serve as editor of the Harvard Law Review. After earning his doctorate in civil law in Madrid, he practiced law with his father at the Washington D.C. firm of Houston and Houston and served on the faculty and as vice dean of the Howard University Law School.

Serving as a mentor to such notables as Thurgood Marshall, Houston made Howard Law School a training ground for African American lawyers. As the first full-time paid special counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he crafted the strategy to end segregation, starting with graduate education programs and building a record of successful precedents based on inequality of education.

His first victory resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court ordering the University of Maryland Law School to admit Donald Murray, an African American, because there were no law schools for blacks in the state. Houston then argued a case that resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that scholarships to out-of-state graduate schools did not constitute equal admission.

In 1940, Houston successfully argued two cases before the Supreme Court involving racial discrimination in selecting railroad bargaining agents. He was appointed to the President’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, but resigned in protest of President Truman’s refusal to ban discrimination by the Capital Transit Authority.

Houston won cases in which the Supreme Court overturned death sentences imposed by juries from which African Americans had been excluded. He laid the groundwork for subsequent victories by the NAACP barring racially restrictive covenants. Due to health problems, Houston left the NAACP, but remained a valued advisor to his successor, Thurgood Marshall. Houston died in 1950. Five Supreme Court justices attended his funeral. In 1958, Howard University honored Houston by naming its new law school building in his honor.