Lighting the Way: Brown V Board of Education
Charles Houston (1895-1950)
Charles Houston left his deanship at Howard University’s School of Law to work full-time for the NAACP in 1935. The same year the Amherst honors graduate, who had been one of the few black officers in WWI, toured South Carolina with a 16mm camera, documenting the disparities between schools for white children and for African Americans. His work supported the NAACP’s legal challenge to the South’s “separate but equal” doctrine established by the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, used to justify segregation throughout the first half of the 20th century. Because most states did not provide separate—let alone equal—black graduate and professional schools, he sued on behalf of applicants to white law, medicine, and other graduate programs. His legal successes, founded on the principles of constitutional law and social justice, were the first cracks in the “separate but equal” doctrine and the stone wall of segregation.
