This week’s Education Matters’ “Roots of Education” article chronicles the extraordinary life story of Charles Houston. While his name may be unfamiliar to most, as a law professor he helped shape the legal mind of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
While Houston’s story is often told, his legal legacy advanced educational opportunities for millions of minority students.
Early in his career Houston argued the case that overturned the policy excluding black scholars from attending the University of Maryland School of Law. In 1944, his work paved the way for the landmark discrimination decision, Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), making school desegregation illegal.
Born in Washington, D.C. in 1895 to lawyer William Houston and his wife Mary Ethel, Charles Houston graduated as valedictorian of his class at M Street High School, the nation’s first black high school. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, widely considered the most prestigious liberal-arts and sciences honor society in the United States.
At the age of 19, Houston graduated Amherst magna cum laude. He returned to D.C. to teach English at Howard University until enlisting in the army at the outbreak of World War I. Commissioned as an officer, he served abroad in France and Germany.
Upon his return to the United States Houston— inspired by a criminal case handled by his father— applied and was accepted into Harvard Law School.
Harvard law professor and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter described Houston as “one of the most brilliant students he ever taught.”
Admitted to the D.C. bar in 1922, he joined the faculty of Howard University’s School of Law.
At Howard, Houston is credited with turning the law school into a legal powerhouse. During his tenure, he trained almost a quarter of America's black law students, including the country’s first black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall. Years later, Justice Marshall recalled how Professor Houston “continually demanded excellence from his students.”
According to his biography “between 1935 and 1940 Houston served as the first full-time salaried Special Counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As special counsel, he crafted the strategy to end legal segregation, winning cases before the United States Supreme Court. Between 1935 and 1948, he argued eight cases before the United States Supreme Court, winning seven of them.
In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Houston to serve as a member of the Fair Employment Practices Committee. But Houston resigned the following year in protest when the White House refused to issue an order outlawing racial discrimination in the Washington D.C. public transit system.
Due to health problems, Houston resigned as chief counsel of the NAACP. His former student, Thurgood Marshall, succeeded him. On April 22, 1950, Houston died in Washington, D.C. at age 54. His death came four years before his life’s work culminated with his mentee Thurgood Marshall winning Brown at the Supreme Court.”
Demonstrating their profound respect for attorney Houston, five Supreme Court Justices attended his funeral.
Houston’s invaluable contributions to ending legalized segregation went largely unrecognized until after his death. The NAACP posthumously awarded him its prestigious Spingarn Medal. Howard Law School’s main hall was also dedicated posthumously to Houston and Harvard’s Law School established the Charles Hamilton Houston Professorship of Law in his honor.
While Houston’s story is often told, his legal legacy advanced educational opportunities for millions of minority students. 
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