Article 8: Shaping Freedom’s Course: Charles Hamilton Houston, Howard University, and Legal Instruction on U.S. Civil Rights

Charles Hamilton Houston led the legal campaign that resulted, ultimately, in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education(1954). The unanimous Brown decision overturned “separate but equal” policy in American public education and proved lethal to other Jim Crow policies in the United States (Kluger 1975; Tushnet 1994; Williams 1998). Houston constructed important parts of the strategic foundation to dismantle Jim Crow while at the Howard University School of Law where he served as the Vice Dean from 1929-35. Later, as NAACP legal counsel and as a private attorney, Houston, and those he taught and mentored, further utilized Howard University to teach civil rights law and to convene meetings and oral argument practice sessions focused on overturning the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Howard University’s School of Law became a laboratory for developing, teaching, testing, and strengthening the legal arguments and skills necessary to defeat legalized segregation (James 2010; Kluger 1975; McNeil 1983).