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Charles Hamilton Houston was an African American lawyer and also the Dean of Howard University Law School. His fame primarily rests at bringing to an end of the legalized racial separation in the United States. It is he and his disciples that prepared the ground work through thoughts and actions that led the U.S. Supreme Court in 1945 to take the decision in Brown v. Board of Education that made racial discrimination in public, primary and secondary schools unconstitutional.
Houston not only participated in this movement, but was the supreme inspiration and mentor to James Nabrit, Spottswood Robinson, William Hastle and many others who continued the battle and remains as an inspiration for social justice even today.
Houston completed his high school at the age of 15 and completed his graduation as one of six valedictorians from Amherst College, Massachusetts in 1915. For the next two years, until the onset of World War I, he taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C. After the onset of World War I, he enlisted himself in the U.S. Army as second lieutenant in field artillery and served Europe in the World War I.
His knowledge and experience in the discriminated racist army directed him to become an advocate to impose the legal rights of the oppressed. After his discharge from the army, Houston joined the Harvard Law School with this objective in mind. In 1922 he earned the bachelor’s degree in law from this university and in 1923 he earned the doctorate.
Houston was a brilliant student and became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. Until 1924 he studied law at the University of Madrid after which he returned to Washington D.C and joined his father’s law practice.
During his tenure of six years (1929-1935) as the vice-dean of the Howard University Law School, he trained almost a quarter of the black law students of the nation. He also saw the dramatic change when HSUL was accredited by American Bar Association as meeting the standards of the Association of American Law School. It is during this period that Houston set the course for the law school and 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….” (McNeil 70-71).
Houston is regarded as the architect for the ultimate success in the long struggle that ends the long practice of legalized discrimination and the “separate but equal” (Smith 510) doctrine accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 in particular in Plessy v. Ferguson.
Houston together with a select group of Howard lawyers that includes Thurgood Marshall were working through the NAACP. Later, the NAACP legal defense and educational fund created a number of precedents that finally led to the disassembling of de jure discrimination after Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, four years after the death of Houston. Houston was posthumously awarded the NAACP’s Spingam Medal in 1950. The main building of the Howard University School of Law was dedicated as Charles Hamilton Houston Hall in 1958.
Hamilton’s credo guides the Howard University School of Law’s mission even today: ““A lawyer’s either a social engineer or he’s a parasite on society.” (McNeil 84) A good lawyer, according to Houston, must have a highly skilled perceptive, who understood the Constitution of the United States and knew how to explore its uses.
Bibliography
1. Smith, J. Clay. Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944. University. Of Pennsylvania. Press, 1993.
2. McNeil, Genna Rae. Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights University. Of Pennsylvania. Press, 1983.
3. Kluger, Richard Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. Vintage Books, 1977.
4. Tushnet, Mark V. The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925-1950. UNC Press 1987.
5. Charles Hamilton Houston: The Gallery, law cornell 2008.
6. Charles Hamilton Houston, NAACP 2008.
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