Photo credit: Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice
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Charles Hamilton Houston was one of the most influential figures in Black life between the two world wars. Houston served as a first lieutenant in World War I in France and his experience in the then-racially segregated U.S. Army made him determined to study law in order to fight for civil rights.
Houston earned an undergraduate degree at Amherst College and a law degree at Harvard University, where he became the first Black student to be elected to the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review. Houston began taking on civil rights cases after he returned to Washington to join his father’s law firm. Later, as dean of the Howard University Law School, Houston set out to train attorneys who would become civil rights advocates. Houston mentored a generation of young Black lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to become the U.S. Supreme Court’s first Black justice.
After leaving Howard University, Houston served as the first general counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP said Houston’s legal brilliance served to undercut the “separate but equal” principle and champion other civil rights cases, earning him the title “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.”
Houston did not live to see segregation declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, having died from a heart attack in 1950. Houston was posthumously awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal. The main building of the Howard University School of Law was named Charles Hamilton Houston Hall in 1958. Harvard Law School named a professorship after Houston and, in 2005, opened the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.
Alexandria City Public School’s Jefferson-Houston PreK-8 IB School is a fully authorized International Baccalaureate® World School named after President Thomas Jefferson and Charles Hamilton Houston.