July 2025 eBulletin Now Available

Dear Fellows:

May 17, 2025, marked the 71^st anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. The impact of this decision on American society cannot be overstated. The decision changed the course of America’s development as a nation, but more importantly, it changed the course of the lived experiences of Black people in America.

Indeed, the College had the good fortune to feature Ruby Bridges – the inspiration for Norman Rockwell’s famous painting, The Problem We All Live With – as a speaker at the 2022 Spring Meeting. Following the Brown ruling, Ruby was the young girl who became the first African American to attend the previously all-White schools of New Orleans.

Last month, I wrote about a trial lawyer whom I greatly admire and noted the impact that he has had on the United States: Abraham Lincoln. Today, I would like to continue in that same vein, noting the immense contribution of another trial lawyer; but unlike Lincoln, in most circles, this lawyer is little-known. His name is Charles Hamilton Houston.

It was 71 years ago that the U.S. Supreme Court stated the obvious truth that, in public life, “[s]eparate facilities are inherently unequal.”  While to most that pronouncement now seems self-evident, that obviously was not always the case.  Just as I mentioned last month, lawyers have often shepherded us through some of our most difficult and tumultuous times, and Charles Houston was one of those lawyers. He dedicated his life to fighting for civil rights, so much so that he became known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.”

Like Lincoln, Houston was a superb lawyer. He was a brilliant legal scholar, but he also had an impressive courtroom presence. His trial skills were outstanding. I suspect that part of the reason that many of you have never heard of Houston is because he was such a modest, unassuming individual. His goals were neither wealth nor personal fame or power; instead, he sought to use his skills for the greatest good of all people and particularly for African Americans.

Houston grew up in Washington D.C. just after the turn of the century. He attended Amherst College where he was Phi Beta Kappa and was selected as one of his class valedictorians, despite being the only Black student in the class. Houston always wanted to be a lawyer, so after Amherst he applied to and was accepted at Harvard University. He enrolled in the fall of 1919, just after the Red Summer of 1919, a violent summer of racial unrest during which hundreds of Blacks were systematically attacked and lynched across the country. Perhaps the worst of the violence occurred in Phillips County, Arkansas, where a young sharecropper had attempted to organize his sharecropping neighbors in order to get better terms from their landlords. Before it was over, the sheriff had sworn in 300 deputies and the governor had called out 500 troops. A week later, the aftermath claimed the lives of some 200 Blacks and five Whites.

Houston excelled in law school. He had a sharp, analytical mind, and he loved the challenge of finding an answer. He was elected to the Harvard Law Review, the first Black person to serve as an editor on that staff. Houston so impressed Felix Frankfurter, who was himself a minority at Harvard, being the only Jewish law professor, that Frankfurter convinced him to stay at Harvard an extra year to get an advanced degree. Following law school, Houston went on to become Dean of the Howard University Law School, but later found his real calling as legal counsel to the NAACP.

It was as counsel to the NAACP that Houston made perhaps his greatest contribution to society. It was largely the effort and determination of Houston that led to the strategy of taking the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson and turning it into an offensive tool. If the Court said separate but equal, then he would force the nation to live up to that decree or acknowledge its impossibility.

Houston decided that the strategy should be to attack the Plessy holding at the point at which the state could least afford to duplicate services—at the graduate and professional schools. One of the first cases in which he was able to implement this strategy occurred in 1935 when a Black student, Donald Murray, applied for admission to the University of Maryland Law School. Murray was denied admittance, but offered scholarship money by the state if he would attend law school outside of Maryland. Houston talked Murray into staying in Maryland, and he filed suit against the University, demanding that the state either provide Murray with an equal education within the state at a separate school or that Murray be allowed to attend the University of Maryland. Houston was joined by a young lawyer whom he had trained at Howard University, Thurgood Marshall. Marshall, coincidentally, had also been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School before attending Howard. Together, Houston and Marshall convinced the court that it had to adhere to the Plessy holding and admit Donald Murray, as there was no “separate but equal” alternative. Houston’s strategy struck a major blow to segregation and marked an important step in dismantling the “separate but equal” doctrine and establishing the principle of equality under the law.

Following the success in Murray, Houston continued the process of methodically chipping away at the notion of legal segregation, traveling the back roads of the south, litigating these monumental issues. Sadly, he did not live to see his efforts come to full fruition. Houston died of a heart attack in 1950 at the age of 54, four years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Brown v. Board of Education.

Richard H. Deane, Jr.
President

To read more from the July eBulletin, click here.