Charles Hamilton Houston, known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow,” was Harvard’s first Black SJD graduate in 1923. While at Harvard, he also became the first Black student on the Harvard Law Review’s editorial board. But he is best known for his work on desegregation. As the Vice Dean of Howard Law School, Houston engineered the multi-year legal strategy that led to the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, repudiating the doctrine of “separate but equal” schools for black and white children. By facilitating a continuous dialogue between practitioners and scholars, he ensured that legal scholarship would resonate outside the academy, and that new legal strategies would be immediately incorporated into the training and practice of lawyers.
Read thoughts from former CHHIRJ Faculty Director Tomiko Brown-Nagin on the legacy of Charles Hamilton Houston here.
Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Project has also shared more on Charles Hamilton Houston’s history here.