The Jim Crow Era was an attempt at the local and national levels to keep the African-American population in captivity. However, with the leadership of one man and the help of many activists, Jim Crow laws finally came to an end. The masses can thank Charles Hamilton Houston, who is also known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.”
“This fight for equality of educational opportunity (was) not an isolated struggle. All our struggles must tie in together and support one another…We must remain on the alert and push the struggle farther with all our might,” said Houston.
Charles Hamilton Houston was born on September 3, 1895, in Washington, D.C. He attended Dunbar High School and furthered his education at Amherst College. After graduating from Amherst in 1915, Houston spent two years teaching English at Howard University.
During World War I, Houston became a First Lieutenant in the United States Infantry and was based in Fort Meade, Maryland. While with the infantry, Houston decided that if he survived the war, he would pursue a career in law. This was fueled by the hatred and discrimination he witnessed as an African-American serving in the war. Houston kept his word and enrolled at Harvard Law School in the Fall of 1919.
By 1923, Houston earned both a Bachelor’s and a Doctorate in Law, and he even became the first African American to serve as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. In 1924, after studying at the University of Madrid, Houston was admitted to the District of Columbia bar and became eligible to practice law. Houston served as the first special counsel to the NAACP, which led to his involvement with the majority of civil rights cases being looked at by the organization.
Houston made a return to the faculty of Howard University teaching law and serving as the dean of the law school. While there, he was able to recruit talented students to aid in the NAACP’s legal efforts. He also became a mentor to a young Thurgood Marshall.
While coming up with strategies for NAACP cases, Houston birthed the idea to demonstrate the failure of states to uphold the “separate but equal” law established in the Plessy v. Ferguson case. He also developed a strategy to challenge segregation in law schools. States would be forced to create new institutions for African-American law school students that were parallel to the facilities of their counterparts, or states could integrate the already existing facilities.
Houston’s legal strategies pioneered the fall of the Jim Crow Era. He challenged issues of civil rights and spent the remainder of his life working with the NAACP to overturn injustice. Charles Houston died in April of 1950 and he was posthumously awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal the same year.
