Charles Hamilton Houston

Charles Hamilton Houston was "the man who killed Jim Crow" — the legal strategist who devised the litigation campaign that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education and the end of legal segregation in America. As the first Black editor of the Harvard Law Review and the dean of Howard University School of Law, he trained an entire generation of civil rights lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, and built the legal foundation that dismantled the separate-but-equal doctrine.

Born in Washington, D.C., on September 3, 1895, Houston graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College and served as a first lieutenant in World War I, where he experienced such vicious racial discrimination from his own country's military that he resolved to use the law to fight injustice. He attended Harvard Law School, becoming the first Black student elected to the Law Review.

As dean of Howard Law School, Houston transformed it from an unaccredited night school into a fully accredited institution that became the training ground for civil rights lawyers. His students called him "Iron Shoes" and "Cement Pants" for his relentless demands. His legal strategy — attacking segregation by forcing states to prove that separate facilities were actually equal (which they never were) — was brilliant in its simplicity and devastating in its execution. He died on April 22, 1950, four years before his student Thurgood Marshall won Brown v. Board. He never saw the victory he made possible.