Born: September 3, 1895, Washington, DC

Education: Amherst College, B.A. Phi Beta Kappa, 1915; Harvard Law School (HLS), first black member of Harvard Law Review, LL.B. cum laude, 1922, D. Jur., 1923, University of Madrid, D.C.L., 1924

Died: April 22, 1950, Bethesda, MD

Raised in a middle-class family and studious, Houston faced isolation but not persecution at “white Amherst.” As a World War I army enlistee and first lieutenant trained in a Jim Crow camp at Des Moines, Iowa, he and others endured racist bigotry. “‘I felt damned glad I had not lost my life fighting for this country’” (Andrews, 2014, p. 95), he said. Honorably discharged in 1919, he was “an impatient and bitter young man.”

Injustice compelled him to study and use law in the struggle for racial equality. During his Harvard studies, lawyering, and work as a dean and teacher at Howard Law School, he defined constitutional principles and strategies for justice. Appointed NAACP general counsel (1935), Houston helped build a foundation of the civil rights movement. Howard-trained lawyers (“social engineers”) used his “due process” and “equal protection” arguments to win the Brown decision overruling school segregation. It was Houston who first breached segregated public education in Murray v. Maryland (1936), filmed the inequality of southern black schools, and sued for equal salaries for teachers. He paved the way in 1940s litigation for the right of suffrage, fair employment, and collective bargaining as well. He received the NAACP Spingarn Award (1950).