Charles Hamilton Houston was one of this nation’s greatest legal strategists. Sometimes referred to as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow,” Houston, the son of a lawyer, masterminded the strategy to dismantle Jim Crow by actively testing the “separate by equal” doctrine in the courts. A mentor to Thurgood Marshall, whom he taught at the Howard School of Law, Houston himself studied at Harvard Law School, where he graduated cum laude and served on the Harvard Law Review.
Sickened by the Jim Crow military camps he was forced to endure as a soldier in World War I and equally disturbed by the tumultuous race riots that rocked the United States when he returned in 1919, Houston resolved to fight racial injustice. Leading the NAACP’s legal assault, Houston played a critical role in every Supreme Court case between 1930 and the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board decision.
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