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Houston was born in Washington, D.C., to a middle-class family who lived in the Strivers' section. 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, and graduated as valedictorian in 1915 at age 20, and the only black student in his class. He returned to D.C. and taught English at Howard University.
As the U.S. entered World War I, Houston joined the U.S. Army as an officer. At the time, the military was racially segregated. From 1917 to 1919, he served as a First Lieutenant in the United States Infantry, based in Fort Meade, Maryland, with service in France. After being chastised for, during a brief detail as a Judge Advocate, finding a Black sergeant not worthy of prosecution, Houston wrote later:
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hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.
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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. 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 become an attorney
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. While doing this he defended African-American George Crawford on charges of murder in Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1933, thus saving him from the electric chair.
In the Hollins v. State of Oklahoma (1935) case, 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. 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. "It is now widely believed that he was innocent." 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 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 Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1939), Houston argued that it was unconstitutional for Missouri to exclude blacks from the state's university law school when, under the "separate but equal" provision, no comparable facility for blacks existed within the state.
Houston was important to how African-Americans where represented in court making it so more African-Americans got the representation they deserved, he also helped by helping make black facilities equal to white ones.
Fun Fact:
the main building of the Howard University School of Law was dedicated as Charles Hamilton Houston Hall.he is also considered "the man who killed jim crow"
