By: Edward Spannaus
At a well-attended ceremony on September 9, the historical 1894 Loudoun County Courthouse was designated the “Charles Hamilton Houston Courthouse,” to honor the ground-breaking Civil Rights attorney.
“I’ve been waiting 50 years to do this,” said Prof. James Hershman, Chair of the Thomas Balch Library Commission, who prefaced his remarks by noting that he was “a little emotional this morning.” Hershman, who holds a Ph.D. in Southern History from the University of Virginia, described when he first met the prominent Richmond Civil Rights lawyer Oliver Hill, and how Hill had told him about Charles Hamilton Houston and the 1933 trial in Loudoun County, in which Houston had led an all-Black legal team to attack the whites-only jury system. Houston’s team “gave this building a prominent place in U.S. history,” Hershman declared.
The 1933 case was a murder trial in which a black man, George Crawford, was charged with the murder of two white women in Middleburg. Crawford was convicted, but Houston’s team got the sentence reduced from execution to life imprisonment. The trial focused national attention on the issue of all-white juries and broke the ground for other cases and an eventual U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the unconstitutionality of the all-white jury system.
This was the first major trial in the American South to be tried by Black lawyers. Loudoun County was strictly segregated at this time, so much so that Houston’s team of lawyers had to travel back to Washington D.C. each night, because they could not find lodging in any local hotels, and local Black families were too frightened to have the lawyers stay in their homes overnight.
“The man who killed Jim Crow”
“We’re not just naming a building,” declared Loudoun NAACP President, the Rev. Michele Thomas, “but we’re giving justice a name in Loudoun County.” She said that what Houston did, is important to all Americans. Rev. Thomas serves on the Loudoun County Heritage Commission, and she described the moment when the proposal to name the Courthouse was made by fellow Commissioner Mitch Diamond.
Roger A. Fairfax, the Dean of the School of Law at Howard University, proclaimed Charles Hamilton Houston to be “the most consequential lawyer” – black or white – in 20th century America, not only because of his legal work to break the system of segregation in the United States by exposing the fallacy of “separate but equal,” but also for inspiring and mentoring a generation of black lawyers including Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and Virginia’s Oliver Hill. Both had worked on Houston’s legal team in the Crawford case.
Dean Fairfax pointed out that after his pioneering legal work on the jury issue, Houston had gone on to put together the legal team which attacked the Plessy doctrine of “separate but equal” in the school system. The work of Houston’ team eventually resulted in the 1954 landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education – although Houston had died of a heart attack four year before the Brown decision.
Houston was rightly called “the man who killed Jim Crow,” Dean Fairfax said.
Who Was Charles Hamilton Houston?
Dean Fairfax’s characterization of Charles Hamilton Houston as “the most consequential lawyer” in 20th century America is well-supported by a review of Houston’s career and his momentous accomplishments.
Houston was born in Washington, D.C. in 1895. His father had studied at Howard University Law School, was admitted to the Bar in D.C., and taught part-time at Howard.
Charles himself attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he was selected for the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honor society. After graduation, he taught in D.C. for a couple of years, and then enlisted in the (very segregated) U.S. Army during World War I. He was commissioned a 1st Lieutenant in the Infantry, but then resigned his commission to go to artillery school. Re-commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant, he was shipped over to France, within months of the end of the war.
After returning home, he enrolled in Harvard Law School. He graduated in the top 5% of his class, and then remained at Harvard after graduation to study for his doctorate under Felix Frankfurter. After being awarded his doctorate in 1923, he traveled to Europe and studied law in Spain where he earned another doctorate. He returned as the best-educated Black lawyer in the United States.
After practicing law and teaching for five years, Houston was appointed Dean of the Howard University Law School in 1929. He transformed and upgraded the Law School, and obtained full accreditation for it. Houston began training a cadre of young Black lawyers who would lead the legal battle to attack segregation.
The Crawford Case
In early 1933, Houston was sent to Boston by the NAACP to fight the extradition of George Crawford, a Black man accused of a double murder in Loudoun County, Virginia. The NAACP did not believe that Crawford could get a fair trial in Virginia, since the grand jury which had indicted Crawford was all white, and he would likely face trial by a jury from which Blacks would be excluded. In the Boston federal court, the Loudoun County prosecutor argued that Virginia had the right under the U.S. Constitution to have Crawford extradited from Massachusetts and to put him on trial. Houston argued that under the same U.S. Constitution, Crawford had a right to a fair trial, with due process and equal protection of the law, which he was unlikely to obtain in Virginia.
The federal judge hearing the case ruled in Crawford’s favor, but the Federal Court of Appeals reversed the District Court ruling, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Law enforcement officers from Virginia took Crawford back to Loudoun County, but not before conducting an all-night interrogation in which Crawford confessed to involvement in the murder – a confession he refused to sign in the morning on advice of his lawyers.
The story of the Crawford trial in Loudoun County has been told in other locations.[i] Suffice it to say here that Houston and his team from Howard University were the first Black lawyers to ever try a case in the Loudoun County Courthouse. The case drew national attention, and was covered extensively in local and D.C. newspapers, from which it was circulated throughout the nation. Crawford was found guilty, but the jury sentence him to life imprisonment rather than death; saving Crawford from the electric chair was regarded as a major victory for Houston and his team.
The Crawford case was proceeding in parallel to the high-profile case of the Scottsboro boys in Alabama. A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court in that case, that all-white juries were unconstitutional in the circumstances of that case. The nationwide attention put on the issue of all-white juries by Charles Houston in the Crawford case is widely regarded as having contributed to the climate in which the Supreme Court made this historic ruling.[ii]
Houston’s team takes on segregation
By 1935, Houston had accepted the position of Special Counsel to the NAACP. That same year, he argued – and won – another all-white jury case before the U.S. Supreme Court – the first time a Black lawyer representing the NAACP had argued and won a case before the high court.[iii]
While at the NAACP, Houston put together a first-rate team of lawyers, mostly Howard-trained, which included later Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a number of later Federal District and Appeals Court judges, and famed Civil Rights lawyers such as Richmond’s Oliver Hill, and the NAACP’s Jack Greenberg.
During this time, Houston and the NAACP were working out a strategy to take on the systemic segregation which had been “legalized” in the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson with its “separate but equal” doctrine. Recognizing that a head-on assault on segregation would not succeed, Houston and his team began to focus on the “equal” provision, especially in education, showing that, case by case, “separate” facilities for Blacks were invariably not “equal.”
They knew that conditions weren’t ripe for challenging the constitutionality of segregation itself, but they might be able to prove to a court that it was unconstitutional as practiced – sinceno Southern state offered equal educational opportunities or equal conditions for Black students. It was this strategy which ultimately led to the monumental 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court – although Houston did not live to see it.
Starting in 1934, House and his protégé Thurgood Marshall put this strategy to work in the case of Donald Murray, an Amherst graduate who had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School. Houston and Marshall prevailed in Baltimore City Court, which ordered the University to admit Murray to its law school. The State appealed, and the Maryland Court of Appeals denied the appeal, upholding the lower court ruling. The State of Maryland decided not to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Mr. Murray entered the Law School without incident.
Houston also wrote extensively about his fight against racial discrimination, and he sought to explain why whites had no reason to fear the elimination of discrimination in schools. In the view of the NAACP, schools were crucial, he wrote, describing the NAACP’s approach:
“It conceives that in equalizing educational opportunities for Negroes, it raises the whole standard of American citizenship and stimulates white Americans as well as black. Fundamentally, the NAACP is not a special pleader; it merely insists that the United States respect its own Constitution and its own laws.”[iv]
In 1938, Houston and his team got another case, similar to the Maryland case, before the U.S. Supreme Court. Houston argued that if Missouri offered white students a law school, then it had to offer qualified Black students a law school education that was every bit as good.[v]
In a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court adopted Houston’s argument, and said that Missouri had to provide the Lloyd Gaines, the applicant, a legal education equivalent to that offered to white students. The opinion was delivered by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and the landmark ruling which would be extended to cover other schools and facilities in jurisdictions where equal opportunities were not provided to Blacks.
By 1938, Houston had decided to go back to his private law practice, where he could take the cases he wanted to. In 1939, he convinced the Department of the Interior to sponsor Marion Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial after she was denied the use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution.[vi]
As a number of speakers at the September 9 event mentioned, after Black citizens of Loudoun County formed the Countywide League to raise money to purchase land for a Black high school, the Countywide League called upon Charles Houston to negotiate with the School Board for funds to build the school upon the land which the citizens had purchased. Houston succeeded in convincing the Board to allocate funds for construction of Douglass High School, which open in 1941.
Houston was the first to win a case at the Supreme Court against a labor union, when the Court held that the railroad unions could not be granted exclusive bargaining power for railroad workers, while excluding blacks from union membership.
In 1944 he was appointed to the President’s Fair Employment Practices Committee, only to later resign over what he considered Truman’s lack of commitment to job equality.
Another long-term battle led by Houston and his colleagues was that against restrictive covenants in real estate, which barred selling homes to Blacks in specified areas. In the 1948 case Shelley v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court ruled that such restrictive covenants could not be enforced by the courts. The Supreme Court didn’t declare such covenants unconstitutional, but It pulled the plug on them by making them unenforceable – which had rapid effects by opening up housing to blacks in neighborhoods previously barred to them.
Houston’s legacy
Charles Hamilton Houston died of a heart attack in 1954, with many of his family and friends believing he had worked himself to death. For years, he was known primarily in legal circles, but today he is finally getting some of the recognition he so deeply deserves. A number of schools bear his name, and the main building of the Howard University School of Law is named Charles Hamilton Houston Hall. And now, in a fitting memorial, the 1894 Courthouse in Loudoun County also bears his name.
William Hastie, part of Houston’s team in the 1930s, and later a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, wrote the following tribute to Houston:
“He guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class citizenship. He was truly the Moses of that journey. He lived to see us close to the promised land of full equality under the law, closer than he even dared hope when he set out on that journey, and so much closer than would have been possible without his genius and his leadership.” [vii]
[i] For example, see “Charles Hamilton and the Crawford Case,” Report of the Loudoun County Heritage Commission on the History of the Loudoun County Courthouse and Its Role in the Path to Freedom, Justice, and Racial Equality in Loudoun County, March 1, 2019.
[ii] The Scottsboro boys were nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of rape in 1931 in Alabama. The complex case went to the U.S. Supreme Court twice. The first was Powell v. Alabama (1932), which reversed three convictions for denial of due process, particularly the right to counsel; the second was Norris v. Alabama (1935) which held that the exclusion of Blacks from juries was a denial of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.
[iii] Hollins v. Oklahoma, 295 U.S. 394 (1935).
[iv] The Crisis, October 1935, quoted in Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education…. (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), p. 193.
[v] Kruger, p. 212-213.
[vi] Afterwards, the DAR recognized its error, and Marian Anderson sang at Constitution Hall on a number of occasions.
[vii] Quoted in Kluger, p. 280.
Sources:
“Charles Hamilton Houston Biography,” Howard University, updated 14 September 2010. Retrieved from archive.org
“Charles Hamilton Houston: The Man Who Killed Jim Crow,” America.gov., 29 Dec. 2008, Retrieved from archive.org
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education…. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.