Houston, Charles Hamilton

(1895-1950)

   Born in Washington, D.C., Charles Houston graduated from Amherst in 1915 and taught literature at Howard University before joining the artillery and serving as an officer in France during World War I. After the war, he went to Harvard Law School and became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated in 1922 and became the first African American to obtain the doctorate in judicial science at Harvard in 1923. From 1924 until 1950 Houston practiced law in Washington, D.C., and taught at Howard Law School from 1924 to 1936. He became head of the law school in 1929. In 1935, he became special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and it was Houston who devised the long-term legal strategy of challenging the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that underpinned the system of segregation in the South. Although suffering from ill-health, he assisted his successor as chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, in a number of cases that culminated in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision in 1954.