Charles Hamilton Houston

Charles Hamilton Houston played a pivotal role in nearly every Supreme Court civil rights case in the two decades before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow,” he authored the legal strategy of puncturing the “separate but equal” justification for segregation.

He was educated at Amherst College (B.A., 1915, valedictorian), Harvard Law School (LL.B., 1922; D.J.S., 1923), where he was the first Black student to serve on the board of the Harvard Law Review, and the University of Madrid (1923–1924), where he was a Sheldon Traveling Fellow. Between college and law school, Houston served as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army and saw action in France during World War I. From 1929–1935, he served as vice dean and then dean of Howard University School of Law, where he transformed the school into the premier training center for Black lawyers.

He left Howard to serve as the first special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1935–1940. In this capacity, he created litigation strategies to attack racial housing covenants and segregated schools, arguing several important civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He also worked to end the exclusion of Blacks from serving on juries throughout the South. At the NAACP, Houston was a mentor to Thurgood Marshall, the founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the first African American Supreme Court justice. After the NAACP, Houston founded the law firm Houston & Gardner, with Wendell P. Gardner, Sr., which launched the careers of numerous Black judges.