02/06/2022
DYK 🧐 – Charles Hamilton Houston Edition
Charles Hamilton Houston trained a generation of young Black attorneys and remains revered by attorneys almost a century later. Houston, born in the Strivers’ section of Washington, DC, was the son of an attorney. His father practiced law in DC for over 4 decades. Houston attended Amherst College where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated valedictorian in 1915, the only Black student in his class. After graduation, he taught English at Howard University before enlisting as an officer in the U.S. Army during WWI (1915-1919). During the Great War, Houston served in a segregated unit as 1st Lieutenant and, for a brief detail, as Judge Advocate. After WWI, he enrolled at Harvard University School of Law where he became the first Black law student elected to Harvard Law Review’s editorial board. Houston graduated cm laude, earning his JD in 1923. In 1924, Houston was admitted to the Washington, D.C. Bar and joined his father’s law practice. At that time, the American Bar Association refused to admit Black attorneys. Several Black attorneys founded the National Bar Association and Houston was one of the founding members of the Washington Bar Association, an affiliate of the NBA. In 1935, Houston joined the NAACP as its first special counsel and served in that capacity until 1940. Houston believed that the law could be used to fight racial discrimination in many situations, including housing discrimination and school segregation. Through his work at the NAACP, Houston played a role in almost every civil rights case heard before the SCOTUS from 1930-1954 and he encouraged students and young attorneys to work for such social purposes. Info. provided by www.law.cornell.edu, www.blackpast.org, naacp.org, & en.wikipedia.org. 🦅⚖️
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