Charles Hamilton Houston
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Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895–April 22, 1950) was a black lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP Litigation Director who helped play a role in dismantling the Jim Crow laws and helped train future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. He was educated at Amherst College, where he was valedictorian, and at Harvard Law School, where he graduated cum laude and was a member of the Harvard Law Review. He was known as "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow."[1], 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 brilliant plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by using the inequality of 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 master stroke that brought about the landmark Brown decision.
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[edit] Cases argued before the Supreme Court
- Hollins v. Oklahoma
- Hale v. Kentucky
- Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada
- Steele v. Louisville & Nashville RR.
- Tunstall v. Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen & Enginemen
- Hurd v. Hodge
[edit] 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 importance 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 namesake of 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. In addition, there is a professorship at Harvard Law named after him. Currently, the Dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, is also the Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of Law.
[edit] External links
- The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute, Madison, WI
- Past Imperfect: Brown's Overlooked Architect
- 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
[edit] Further reading
- McNeil, Genna Rae, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights, ISBN 0-8122-1179-0.
- Kluger, Richard, Simple Justice, ISBN 0-394-72255-8.192.
