Most scholars today would point to Brown as the most important case that ever came up before the Supreme Court in the preceding century. And this is rightly so. Why? Because it changed forever the social, political, and economic landscape of the U.S. It did this not only by means of its specific legal mandate of ending school segregation by vanquishing that bogus concept of "separate but equal" established by Plessy v. Ferguson, but also by catalyzing the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). Now, I know that the ignorant in this country tend to think of the CRM as a step backward that blacks forced this country to undergo. But, as I have just said, they are ignorant. Think about this: the CRM is one of those major steps that this country has had to undergo in its long--and as yet unfinished--journey toward a just and democratic society (other steps include the War of Independence and the Civil War). And justice and democracy benefits all, including the ignorant! Consider, in this vein, the following examples that readily come to my mind that we can associate with the CRM:

 
The CRM helped to institutionalize (not invent) the principle that in a democracy, the citizenry can take to the streets (by means of boycotts, sit-ins, marches, etc.) and call upon their political leaders to heed their demands. This principle would later be used effectively by the Anti-Vietnam War Movement.

The CRM has helped to create a legal and political environment in which the Bill of Rights enshrined in the Constitution is taken more seriously, than before.

The CRM helped to refocus, on an unprecedented scale, some of the energy of the government on taking care of the interests of the working classes as a whole, rather than being almost exclusively concerned with the interests of the rich.

The CRM helped to reignite the women's movement which was almost dead after women had succeeded in their struggle to gain the right to vote. As a result, opportunities in public life (in terms of education, jobs, elected offices, etc.) exploded for women; and at the same time forced society to pay greater attention to the issue of women's human rights (freedom from sexual violence, etc.)

The CRM helped to precipitate movements for civil rights of other racial/ ethnic minorities (Hispanics, Native Americans, etc.)

The CRM has helped to create a political, economic and social environment in which society as a whole has the potential to reap enormous benefits arising out of OPTIMUM contributions of intelligence, talent, skills and energy from huge sections of the population (women, the white working class, and racial minorities), that was not available before.

The CRM helped to raise the stature and leadership potential of the U.S. on the world stage as the U.S. moved in the direction of upholding democratic principles long enshrined in the constitution.

The CRM has helped to create a social and political environment in which the potential for violent, internal, self-destructive conflagrations based on race and ethnicity (of the type we have witnessed in such places as Liberia, Rwanda, Sudan, Kosovo, Bosnia,  East Timor, and Sri Lanka in recent years), has been greatly reduced.

All in all, the CRM was a great thing for justice and democracy in this country, the beneficiaries of which are all of us (including the ignorant). Yet, without Brown, it is quite possible that the CRM would not have emerged. So, you need to know something about Brown. The following biographical material on two of the key players who litigated the Brown case for the NAACP, together with other assigned material, should help you in this regard.

OVERVIEW

Houston was in private practice with his father from 1924 to 1950. Between 1929 and 1935, he was vice dean of the school of law at Howard University. He was special counsel to the NAACP from 1935 to 1940, and a member of the national legal aid committee from 1940 to 1950. He served as the vice-president for the American Council on Race Relations from 1944 to 1950, and was a member of the President's Commission on Fair Employment Practice in 1944.

While with the NAACP, Houston teamed with the American Fund for Public Service to direct a program of legal action and education aimed at the elimination of segregation. Former student Thurgood Marshall served under Houston for several years. While in this position, Houston argued several cases before the United States Supreme Court, includingMissouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada . The court ruled that Missouri could not keep an African American from attending the white state law school because there was no such school for African-Americans. This ruling was a major blow to the separate but equal rule.

Historically, Houston's major impact was in his strengthening of Howard University's Law School, as well as his work in civil rights litigation . Much of the cases he argued were instrumental in setting precedents that were to be used in the historic Brown v. Board of Education and Boling v. Sharpe cases that were to outlaw racial segregation. In addition, he was a columnist for The Afro-American.

Houston died April 22, 1950, of a heart ailment and was buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery. Five Supreme Court justices attended his funeral. He received a great deal of recognition after his death, including the Springarn Medal, awarded by the NAACP.
 

EXPANDED BIOGRAPHY

Whether plotting strategy for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), arguing cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, or retooling a second-rate law school into a first class institution that churned out generations of brilliant black lawyers, Houston helped focus politicians and courts in the United States on the patently unconstitutional foundation of racial inequality. Although he labored quietly and without self-promotion, his famous students and more flamboyant colleagues were always quick to point out that he effectively laid the groundwork for many of the century's milestone court decisions that progressively undid the knot of legal discrimination in the United States.

Unlike the more prominent civil rights leaders of the twentieth century, Charles Hamilton Houston did not experience abject poverty or suffer the injurious tentacles of blatant discrimination as a child. He was born on September 3, 1895, in Washington, D.C., the only child of William, a lawyer, educator, and future assistant U.S. attorney general, and Mary, a public school teacher who abandoned her career for hairdressing and sewing in order to provide additional money for the family. The Houstons revered education, surrounding young Charles with books and encouraging his prodigious intellect. Legend had it that Houston's grandfather, a Kentucky slave, constantly provoked the ire of his illiterate master by reading books that had been smuggled onto the plantation. Largely insulated from the ways in which society denigrated blacks--including inadequate housing, lower wages for doing the same work as whites, and racial violence--Charles Houston attended what was arguably the best all-black high school in the country, from which he graduated as class valedictorian in 1911.
 

Excelled in School, Became Activist-Dean

After serving in the army during World War I, Houston entered Harvard Law School, where his intellectual zeal and worldly curiosity found a home. Author Richard Kluger wrote in his 1976 book Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, "From the start, it was evident that [Houston] had a mind ideally contoured for a career at law. He relished the kind of abstract thinking needed to shape the building blocks of the law. He had a clarity of thought and grace of phraseology, a retentive brain, a doggedness for research, and a drive within him that few of his colleagues could match or understand."

After his first year, Houston was elected to the Harvard Law Review, a prestigious scholastic honor, and discovered a legal mentor in the eminent professor and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Graduating with honors, Houston decided to obtain his doctorate degree in juridical science under Frankfurter, who taught his student not only the finer points of constitutional law but also the need to incorporate the lessons of history, economics, and sociology into a comprehensive, legalistic world view. These teachings, in combination with his own growing awareness of the second-class citizenship forced on blacks, forged in Houston the conviction of a social activist and the strategic thinking of a lawyer who understood the power of law to effect social change.

Returning from a one-year fellowship at the University of Madrid in Spain, Houston practiced law with his father, an experience that exposed him to the minutiae of case preparation and provided courtroom opportunities for him to exercise his blossoming forensic talents. In 1929 Houston was appointed vice-dean at the Howard University School of Law, a black institution that, despite glaring weaknesses, had produced nearly all the distinguished black lawyers in the country for two generations after the Civil War. Recognizing the need for blacks to thoroughly understand constitutional law with an eye toward dismantling the legal basis of segregation, and for black students to have higher education institutions on a par with those available only to whites, Houston set about reconstituting the law school. He shut down the night school, from which his father had graduated, toughened admissions standards, improved the library and curriculum, and purged from the faculty those he believed were not tapping the intellectual potential of the next generation's black lawyers and leaders.

By 1935, although there was still only one black lawyer for every 10,000 blacks in the country, Houston was optimistic. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, writing in the Journal of American History in 1976, quoted Houston as saying at an NAACP convention, "The most hopeful sign about our legal defense is the ever-increasing number of young Negro lawyers, competent, conscientious, and courageous, who are anxious to pit themselves (without fee) against the forces of reaction and injustice.... The time is soon coming when the Negro will be able to rely on his own lawyers to give him every legal protection in every court."
 

Pursued Civil Rights as a Teacher and Lawyer

Of the students who braved Houston's intense mock court proceedings and military-style cerebral drillings, none would more successfully carry the torch that Houston had lit than Thurgood Marshall, who would ultimately be appointed to the Supreme Court. "First off, you thought he was a mean so-and-so," Marshall was quoted as saying in Simple Justice. "He used to tell us that doctors could bury their mistakes but lawyers couldn't. And he'd drive home to us that we would be competing not only with white lawyers but really well-trained white lawyers, so there just wasn't any point crying in our beer about being Negroes.... He made it clear to all of us that when we were done, we were expected to go out and do something with our lives."

In 1934 Houston was retained by the NAACP, then the dominant civil rights organ of the century, to chip away at segregation by leading a legal action campaign against racially biased funding of public education and discrimination in public transportation. One of his first cases, in which his legal artfulness was fully displayed, involved a black man from Maryland who wished to attend the University of Maryland Law School, the same school that years earlier had denied Thurgood Marshall admission on the grounds that he was black. Houston operated on the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which validated separate but equal public education. University officials had told Donald Murray that because he was black he would not be admitted, but that he was qualified to attend Princess Anne Academy, a lackluster, all-black institution that was an extension of the university. Houston and Marshall set out to prove that Princess Anne Academy, without a law school or any other graduate programs, did not provide an education on a par with the University of Maryland, and therefore, the state had violated Plessy.

Houston and Marshall were victorious, not only in getting Murray into the University, but in showing that states that wanted to sustain separate but equal education had to face the onerous and expensive task of making black institutions qualitatively equal to white institutions. The courts, it became clear, were going to carefully scrutinize the allegedly equal education in states hiding behind Plessy. Segregation took on an impractical quality to those who tried to defend it on moral grounds. In subsequent pioneering cases, Houston would further lead the attack on segregated education by using the testimony of psychologists and social scientists who claimed that black children suffered enormous and lasting mental anguish as a result of segregation in public schools and the societal ostracism of blacks.
 

Argued Against Discrimination Before Supreme Court

During his tenure at the NAACP, Houston was praised not only for his legalistic virtuosity but for his prescience in picking cases that would collectively help erode segregation in the country. In his second major Supreme Court victory, he succeeded in guaranteeing that an all-white firemen labor union fairly represent in collective bargaining black firemen excluded from the union. Houston also persuaded the court that racially restricted covenants on real estate--such as deeds prohibiting blacks from occupying a house--were unconstitutional. In 1945 he argued and won a case involving a black woman from Baltimore who, on the basis of her skin color, had been denied entry into a training class operated by a public library and funded by tax-payer dollars.

Always trying to expand the scope and appeal of the NAACP, Houston suggested the establishment of satellite offices on college campuses and advised the association's officials to attend conferences of religious leaders as a way of better accessing black communities. As a native Washingtonian with many political contacts, he was also expected to comment on the racial consequences of legislation that was being considered by Congress, where he frequently testified before legislative committees. In 1944 Houston was appointed to the Fair Employment Practices Committee, created to enforce integration in private industries, but quit 20 months later, decrying what he viewed as a transparent commitment to racial equality on the part of the administration of President Harry S. Truman.

Houston died in 1950, four years before his star pupil, Marshall, succeeded in arguing before the Supreme Court that the separate but equal defense of segregated education was unconstitutional. The precedent set in Brown v. Board of Education was the culmination of decades of legal challenges, many of which had been masterminded and implemented by Houston. Although his name never would be as widely known as others in the civil rights community, many lawyers and activists who worked with him, including Marshall, have never strayed from their belief that Charles Hamilton Houston was one of the early, unsung heroes of the assault on segregation. Richard Kluger quoted Howard University Professor Charles Thompson in Simple Justice as saying, "[Houston] got less honor and remuneration than almost anyone else involved in this fight. He was a philanthropist without money."
 

Sources:

Auerbach, Jerold, Unequal Justice, Oxford University Press, 1976.

Bardolph, Richard, The Negro Vanguard, Vintage Books, 1959.

Franklin, John Hope, and August Meier, editors, Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century, University of Illinois Press, 1982.

Kluger, Richard, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality, Knopf, 1976.

Metcalf, George R., Black Profiles, McGraw-Hill, 1970.

Segal, Geraldine, In Any Fight Some Fall, Mercury Press, 1975.

Periodicals

Journal of American History, March 1976.

Additional information for this profile was obtained from papers housed at Howard University, Washington, D.C.
 

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908, Marshall earned a B.A. degree from Lincoln University , hoping to become a dentist. He changed his mind, and instead went to Howard University's law school, graduating in 1933 at the top of his class. He immediately went into private practice in Baltimore, where he remained for five years.

In 1936, he entered into what was going to be a long and illustrious career with the NAACP, starting as an assistant special counsel, and eventually becoming director-counsel of the Legal Defense and Educational fund, a position he left in 1961. In 1938, as a national special counsel, he handled all cases involving the constitutional rights of African Americans. Then, in 1950, he was named director-counsel of the organization's eleven-year-old Legal Defense and Education Fund. In 1954, as part of an imposing team of lawyers, he played a key role in the now-historic Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, Brown v. Board of Education , which overruled the "separate but equal" doctrine in public education. He also figured prominently in such important cases as Sweatt v. Painter (requiring the admission of a qualified black student to the law school of Texas University) and Smith v. Allwright (establishing the right of Texas blacks to vote in Democratic primaries). Of the thirty-two cases that he argued before the Supreme Court, Marshall won twenty-nine.

Marshall was also known for his lifelong support of rights for women. Constance Baker Motley commented that Marshall hired her for a NAACP counsel position when virtually every other employer had turned her down. He also encouraged her when he argued cases before the Supreme Court, and made certain he pointed out other African-American women role models.

In 1961, Marshall became a federal circuit judge for the second circuit. In 1946, he was awarded the prestigious Springarn Medal for his many achievements. He had over twenty honorary degrees to his credit, including LL.D. honors from the University of Liberia in 1960, the University of Michigan in 1964, and University of Otago, in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1968. Marshall was also the representative for the White House Conference on Youth and Children, and a member of the National Bar Association. He was once sent by President John F. Kennedy to be a personal representative to the independence ceremonies of Sierra Leone.

Duke University professor John Hope Franklin told Ebony: "If you study the history of Marshall's career, the history of his rulings on the Supreme Court, even his dissents, you will understand that when he speaks, he is not speaking just for Black Americans but for Americans of all times. He reminds us constantly of the great promise this country has made of equality, and he reminds us that it has not been fulfilled. Through his life he has been a great watchdog, insisting that this nation live up to the Constitution."

Marshall's work on behalf of civil rights spans five and a half decades and includes the history-making Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that led to integration of the nation's public schools in 1954. As an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Marshall fought to have blacks admitted to segregated state universities, challenged the armed services to offer equal treatment for black recruits, and even assured that blacks would have the right to serve on a jury. John Hope Franklin put it this way: "For Black people he holds special significance because it was Thurgood ... and a few others who told us we could get justice through interpretation of the law.... Marshall was at the head of these lawyers who told us to hold fast because they were going to get the law on our side. And they did."

Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908, into modest but prosperous circumstances. His mother worked as a teacher in a segregated public elementary school, and his father was a steward at the staunchly all-white Gibson Island yacht club. Marshall's first name derives from a great-grandfather, Thoroughgood Marshall, who was brought to America from the Congo as a slave. Both of Thurgood Marshall's grandfathers owned grocery stores. The judge told Ebony that he rarely felt uncomfortable about his race while growing up in Baltimore. He lived in a nice home on Druid Hill Avenue and played with children of both races. He described himself as a "mediocre" student and a "cutup," whose punishment was often to read the United States Constitution out loud. By the time he graduated from high school, he knew it by heart.

Planned to Study Medicine

The relationship settled him down, and he graduated cum laude from Lincoln in 1930. From there he moved to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he enrolled in the small, all-black law school. The course supervisor was Charles H. Houston , a demanding but inspiring instructor who instilled in his students a burning desire to change segregated society. Marshall graduated first in his class, earning his LL.B. in 1933. He was admitted to the Maryland Bar the same year.
 

Joined NAACP Staff

"For the next 20 years," Williams wrote, "[Marshall] traveled the country using the Constitution to force state and federal courts to protect the rights of Black Americans. The work was dangerous, and Marshall frequently wondered if he might not end up dead or in the same jail holding those he was trying to defend." Marshall prepared cases against the University of Missouri and the University of Texas on behalf of black students. He petitioned the governor of Texas when a black was excluded from jury duty. During and after the Second World War, he was an outspoken opponent of the government detention of Japanese Americans, and in 1951 he investigated unfair court-martial practices aimed at blacks in the military in Korea and Japan. William H. Hastie , of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, told the New York Times: "Certainly no lawyer, and practically no member of the bench has Thurgood Marshall's grasp of the doctrine of law as it affects civil rights."
 

Helped End School Segregation

Marshall's first wife died after a long illness in 1955. A year later, he married Cecilia Suyat, a secretary at the NAACP's New York office. The Brown vs. Board of Education ruling had made Marshall a national figure--he was known for some time as "Mr. Civil Rights"--and when Democrats took control of the White House, the ambitious attorney let it be known that he wanted a judgeship.

Eventually, after much opposition from Southern senators and even from Robert Kennedy, Marshall was named to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 1961. As the civil rights movement gained ground in the 1960s, so did Marshall. In 1965 he was given the post of United States solicitor general, a position in which he represented the government before the Supreme Court. His most important case during these years was the one leading to the adoption of the Miranda rule, which requires policemen to inform suspects of their rights.

Named to Supreme Court

Marshall was known as the most tart-tongued member of the court. He was never reticent with his opinions, especially on matters affecting the civil rights agenda. Former justice William Brennan, long Marshall's liberal ally on the court, told Ebony: "The only time Thurgood may make people uncomfortable, and perhaps it's when they should be made uncomfortable, is when he'll take off in a given case that he thinks ... is another expression of racism."

It is therefore no surprise that judge Marshall was a vocal critic of both Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Few justices have been known to speak out on political matters, and for years Marshall himself refused to grant interviews. Even into late in his career, however, he was stung by court reversals on minority set-aside programs and affirmative action. In 1987 Marshall dismissed Reagan as "the bottom" in terms of his commitment to black Americans. He later told Ebony: "I wouldn't do the job of dogcatcher for Ronald Reagan." Last year Marshall heaped equal vitriol on the Bush administration after the president vetoed an important civil rights bill. The justice told Newsweek that the actions of Bush and Reagan reflect a return to the days "when we [blacks] really didn't have a chance."

Liberal Voice in Changing Court

Before his death, Marshall and his wife lived near Washington, D.C. Their oldest son, Thurgood, Jr. is an attorney on Senator Edward Kennedy's Judiciary Committee staff. The younger son, John, is a Virginia state policeman. The Marshalls also have several grandchildren.

Sources:

Newsweek, September 21, 1987; August 6, 1990.

New York Times, November 23, 1946; April 6, 1951.

People, July 7, 1986.