Charles Hamilton Houston

Abstract

THE BLA CK LA W JO URNA L PAGE 123 CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON By GENNA RAE McNEIL* C HARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON, the descendant of a line of free Blacks and slaves, was born September 3, 1895, in Washington, D.C., where he lived and worked until his death at the age of fifty-four in April, 1950. His parents were William LePre Houston, a lawyer, and Mary Ethel Hamilton Houston, a former teacher and hairdresser. To the extent that it was within their power, these two working parents provided a privileg- ed environment for their very capable only child. Houston attended M Street High School (subsequently renamed for the Black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar), the college preparatory school for Blacks in Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area. At the age of nineteen, he graduated Magna Cum Laude with an honors degree in English and Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College. The next two years he taught English at Howard Univer- sity's Commercial College. At the age of twenty-one Charles Houston entered the first Black officers' training camp, Fort Des Moines, where he earned his commission as a First Lieutenant in the Infantry. The Army's unfair assignment of a number of Black infan- try officers and disparaging reports regarding the ability of Blacks to train in the Special Services, however, offended and provoked Houston so much that he relinquished his rank and retrained to become a field artillery officer in the American Expeditionary Forces. As a Second Lieutenant overseas, he encountered virulent racism practiced by Red Cross workers, white enlisted men and his fellow white officers. Because of his race and color, he suffered arbitrary insults, indignities and exposure to mortal danger. Injustice at home and abroad prompted a decision to join his father in the practice of law. In the summer of 1919 following his dis- charge from the Army, racial violence erupted in Washington, D.C., and a score of other localities. Blacks were murdered and victimized. In the autumn following that Red Summer, Charles Houston entered Harvard Law School. He distinguished him- self at Harvard, being the first Black to serve on the Harvard Law Review, earning his LL.B. ('22) with an honors average and re- ceiving the Langdell Scholarship for further studies. Houston earned all A s in his fourth year of law studies during which time he was instructed by such men as Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter.' In 1923 he ob- tained his Doctorate in Juridical Science and was awarded the prestigious Sheldon Travel- ing Fellowship which allowed him to study civil law at the University of Madrid and sit as an observer in the courts of Spain, Italy, Greece, Tunisia and Algeria. After Houston returned from southern Europe and northern Africa and joined the District of Columbia bar, his father proudly renamed the office, Houston & Houston . *B.A. Kalamazoo College; M. A. University of Chicago; Candi- date for PhD History, University of Chicago. Ms. McNeil's dissertation topic is: Charles Hamilton Houston (1895-1950) and the Struggle for Civil Rights. She is a former instructor of Afro-American History at Roosevelt University, and is newly appointed to the faculty of the History Department, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 1. Letter from Walter White to Roger N. Baldwin, July 8, 1933, in 8 American Fund for Public Service: Applications Favorably Acted Upon 135, Frankfurter commented ten years later that Houston was one of the most brilliant and able students at Harvard within his memory.