Howard University and the Legal Strategy That Ended Segregation
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C.
Charles Hamilton Houston arrived at Howard University Law School in nineteen twenty-nine as vice dean, with a Harvard law degree and a plan. The plan was not to win any particular case. The plan was to dismantle the legal architecture of American segregation, case by case, over a period of decades. Houston called himself a social engineer. He meant it precisely.
Howard's law school had been founded in eighteen sixty-nine, two years after the university itself, chartered by Congress as part of the post-Civil War effort to provide higher education to formerly enslaved people and their descendants. By nineteen twenty-nine, when Houston arrived, it was a practicing institution training Black lawyers who would serve Black clients in a Jim Crow legal system. Houston transformed it into something more focused: a training ground for the lawyers who would challenge that system in federal court.
His method was straightforward and required extraordinary patience. He identified areas of constitutional law where the "separate but equal" doctrine established in Plessy versus Ferguson in eighteen ninety-six was most vulnerable. He began with graduate and professional schools, where states had not bothered to build separate Black institutions at all. He filed cases. He trained his students in the argument.
One of those students was Thurgood Marshall, who graduated from Howard Law in nineteen thirty-three. Marshall spent the next two decades arguing the cases Houston had designed, winning twenty-nine of thirty-two before the Supreme Court. The most famous was Brown versus Board of Education, decided May seventeenth, nineteen fifty-four, which overturned Plessy and declared racially segregated public schools unconstitutional.
Charles Hamilton Houston died in nineteen fifty, four years before Brown was decided. Thurgood Marshall attended the argument knowing his dean had not lived to hear the outcome.
Alain Locke, who taught philosophy at Howard for four decades, called himself the midwife of the Harlem Renaissance. Carter G. Woodson, who founded what became Black History Month, earned his doctorate from Harvard before he joined the Howard faculty. The university on this hill produced more of the intellectual architecture of twentieth-century Black America than any other single institution.
