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African American lawyer

Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895 – April 22, 1950) was an American lawyer. He was the dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP first special counsel. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Houston played a significant role in dismantling Jim Crow laws, especially attacking segregation in schools and racial housing covenants. He earned the title "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow". Houston is also well known for having trained and mentored a generation of black attorneys, including Thurgood Marshall, future founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the first Black Supreme Court Justice. He recruited young lawyers to work on the NAACP's litigation campaigns, building connections between Howard's and Harvard's university law schools.

Houston was born in Washington, D. C., to a middle class family who lived in the Strivers' section. His father William Le Pré Houston, the son of a former slave, had become an attorney and practiced in the capital for more than four decades. Charles' mother, Mary (born Hamilton) Houston, worked as a seamstress. Houston attended segregated local schools, entering M Street High School (now Dunbar) at the age of 12 and graduating at age 15. He studied at Amherst College beginning in 1911, was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society,</blockquote>

After his return to the U. S. in 1919, he entered Harvard Law School. He was the first black student elected to the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review and graduated cum laude. Houston was also a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. He earned a bachelor's of law in 1922 and a DJS from Harvard in 1923. That same year he was awarded a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship to study at the University of Madrid. After his return, he was admitted to the Washington, DC bar in 1924 and joined his father's practice.

In 1924 Houston married Gladys Moran. They divorced in 1937. He next married Henrietta Williams. They had Houston's only child in 1940, Charles Hamilton Houston, Jr. Houston was a founding member of the affiliated Washington Bar Association. He was recruited to the Howard University faculty by the school's first African American president, Mordecai Johnson. From 1929 to 1935, Houston served as Vice Dean and Dean of the Howard University School of Law. He developed the school, beginning its years as a major national center for training black lawyers. He extended its part time program to a full time curriculum and gained accreditation by the Association of American Law Schools and the American Bar Association. Bringing prominent attorneys to the school as speakers and to build a law network for his students, Houston served as a mentor to a generation. He influenced nearly one quarter of all the black lawyers in the United States at the time, including former student Thurgood Marshall, who became a United States Supreme Court justice. Houston believed that the law could be used to fight racial discrimination and encouraged his students to work for such social purpose. Houston left Howard in 1935 to serve as the first special counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving in this role until 1940. In this capacity he created litigation strategies to attack racial housing covenants and segregated schools, arguing several important civil rights cases before the U. S. Supreme Court. Through his work at the NAACP, Houston played a role in nearly every civil rights case that reached the US Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Houston worked to bring an end to the exclusion of African Americans from juries across the South. He defended African American George Crawford on charges of murder in Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1933, and saved him from the electric chair. In the related Hollins v. State of Oklahoma (1935), Houston led an all black legal team before the US Supreme Court to appeal another murder case in which the defendant was convicted by an all white jury and sentenced to death. The defense team had challenged the all white jury during the trial, but the conviction was upheld by the appeals court. Hearing the case a certiorari, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision and ordered a new trial. Hollins was tried a third time, again before an all white jury, and was convicted in 1936. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1950. At the time, Oklahoma and southern states systematically excluded blacks from juries, in part because they were not on the voter rolls, having been disenfranchised across the South since the turn of the century by state barriers to voter registration. In the 21st century, attorneys continue to have to challenge prosecutorial strategies that exclude blacks from juries. Houston's strategy on public education was to attack segregation by demonstrating the inequality resulting from the "separate but equal" doctrine dating from the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson (1897). He orchestrated a campaign to force southern districts to build facilities for blacks equal to those for whites, or to integrate their facilities. He focused on law schools because, at the time, mostly males attended them. He believed this would obviate the fears whites expressed that integrated schools would lead to interracial dating and marriage. In all, ten members of the firm advanced to become judges, including Theodore Newman and Wendell Gardner, Jr., the son of Wendell Gardner. Houston also directed the NAACP's campaign to end restrictive housing covenants. In the early 20th century, the organization had won a United States Supreme Court case, Buchanan v. Warley (1917), which prohibited state and local jurisdictions from establishing restrictive housing. Real estate developers and agents developed restrictive covenants and deeds. The Court ruled in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) that such restrictions were the acts of individuals and beyond the reach of the constitutional protections. As the NAACP continued with its campaign in the 1940s, Houston drew from contemporary sociological and other studies to demonstrate that such covenants and resulting segregation produced conditions of overcrowding, poor health, and increased crime that adversely affected African American communities. Following Corrigan, Houston contributed to what was a 22 year campaign, in concert with lawyers he had trained, in order to overturn the constitutionality of restrictive covenants. This was achieved in the US Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). The court ruled that "judicial enforcement of private right constitutes state action for the purpose of the fourteenth amendment."

Houston died from a heart attack on April 22, 1950, at the age of 54.

In 1950, Houston was posthumously awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal. In 1958, the main building of the Howard University School of Law was dedicated as Charles Hamilton Houston Hall. The Charles Houston Bar Association and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, established at Harvard Law School in 2005, were named for him. Elena Kagan, formerly the Dean of Harvard Law School, was also the Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of Law there; she is now an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The Washington Bar Association annually awards the Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion of Merit to an individual who has advanced the cause of Houstonian jurisprudence. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante included Charles Hamilton Houston on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.