Charles Hamilton Houston

Charles Hamilton Houston
Born	September 3, 1895(1895-09-03) Washington, D.C.
Died	April 22, 1950(1950-04-22) (aged 54) Washington, D.C.
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Amherst College Harvard Law School
Occupation	Lawyer

Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895 – April 22, 1950) was an African American lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP Litigation Director who played a significant role in dismantling the Jim Crow laws and trained future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.^[1]

Houston was born in Washington, D.C. His father worked as a lawyer. Houston started at Amherst College in 1911, was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society,^[2] and graduated as valedictorian in 1915. He returned to D.C. to teach at Howard University. As the U.S. entered World War I, Houston joined the then racially segregated U. S. Army as an officer and was sent to France. He returned to the U.S. in 1919, and began attending Harvard Law School. He was a member of the Harvard Law Review and graduated cum laude.

Going on to become known as "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow."^[3] he played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Houston's plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by demonstrating the inequality in the "separate but equal" doctrine from the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision as it pertained to public education in the United States was the masterstroke that brought about the landmark Brown decision.

Legacy

Houston was posthumously awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1950 and, in 1958, the main building of the Howard University School of Law was dedicated as Charles Hamilton Houston Hall. His significance became more broadly known through the success of Thurgood Marshall and after the 1983 publication of Genna Rae McNeil's Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

Houston is the person for whom the Charles Houston Bar Association and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School—which opened in the fall of 2005—are named. In addition, there is a professorship at Harvard Law named after him; Elena Kagan, formerly the Dean of Harvard Law School and now an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was the Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of Law.

Houston was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. In 1991, future-President Barack Obama, then the president of the Harvard Law Review, appeared in a minute long infomercial to commemorate Houston.^[4]

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Charles Hamilton Houston on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.^[5]

The C.H. Houston apartment building, formerly owned by Howard University, at 1712 16th St NW, Washington, D.C. was named after Charles Hamilton Houston.

The Washington Bar Association annually awards the Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion of Merit to an individual who has advanced the cause of Houstonian jurisprudence.

References

1. ^ "Charles Houston Bar Association Awards" Price and Associates. Retrieved February 23, 2011.
2. ^ Charles Hamilton Houston, bio, NAACP.org, accessed Oct 14, 2009
3. ^ The Man Who Killed Jim Crow, America.gov, accessed Oct 14, 2009.
4. ^ 1991 Obama infomercial commemorating Houston
5. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.

Further reading

• James Jr, Rawn (2010). Root and Branch: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and the Struggle to End Segregation. New York: Bloomsbury Press. http://www.bloomsburypress.com/books/catalog/root_and_branch_hc_067. 
• McNeil, Genna Rae (1983). Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812211790. 
• Kluger, Richard (1977). Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0394722558. 

External links

• Charles Hamilton Houston information at Cornell University
• Charles H. Houston and the Gaines case
• Biography of Houston at the "Brown at 50" website
• Charles Houston Bar Association
• The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School
• The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute, Madison, WI
• Road to Brown transcript, California Newsreel, Presentation of University of Virginia

Persondata
Name	Houston, Charles Hamilton
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	September 3, 1895
Place of birth	Washington, D.C.
Date of death	April 22, 1950
Place of death	Washington, D.C.