THE MAN WHO KILLED JIM CROW"

 “THE MAN WHO KILLED JIM CROW”

There were so many people involved in the fight to end Jim Crow, or neo-slavery, as I prefer to call it.  The phase of neo-slavery that built up and menaced us all from 1866 finally ended 100 years later in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Act.  We are now in a time when we are wrestling with the “new Jim Crow,” and as we seek to find our way in this Black History Month, I want to lift up one giant who has largely been forgotten, but whose life and witness shows us a path for our time.   Those who knew him and who remember him often call him “the man who killed Jim Crow.”

His name was Charles Hamilton Houston, and he was born in Washington, DC, in September, 1895, seven months after the death of Frederick Douglass, in the same year that Ida Wells got married, in the same month that Booker T. Washington gave his “surrender” speech in Atlanta, and eight months before the heinous SCOTUS decision “Plessy v. Ferguson” which gave legal status to neo-slavery.  Ouite a run of time!  His father was a lawyer in DC, and his grandfather had escaped from slavery in Kentucky and had become a conductor on the Underground Railroad.  He was an outstanding student and went to Amherst and graduated summa cum laude in 1915.

He joined his father’s law firm, but when World War I came along, Houston joined the army to fight for democracy, or so he thought.  His experience of racism and segregation in the US army deepened his commitment to ending neo-slavery.  This is what he wrote about it:  “The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in me dying for a world controlled by white people.  I made up my mind that if I got through this war, I would study law and use my life fighting for people who could not strike back.”  

He did make it through the war and kept his vow.  He entered Harvard Law School in 1920 and became the first Black student elected to the Harvard Law Review.  After graduation, he joined his father’s law firm in DC and taught part-time at Howard University Law School.  In 1929, the new president of Howard, Mordecai Johnson, recruited him to become dean of the Law School, with the intent of changing life in America.  Hamilton transformed the Law School from a part-time, non-accredited institution to a powerful, accredited law school which became the centerpiece of civil rights litigation, annually producing a strong group of lawyers rigorously trained to fight for equal justice under the law.  He had three main steps to end neo-slavery:  to develop that cadre of well-trained and dedicated Black lawyers, to build a broad base of support in Black communities for this work, and to litigate against neo-slavery and segregation in courts.  

He had many powerful students, but his most famous was Thurgood Marshall.  He trained Marshall to become the giant that he became.  Marshall had this to say about Hamilton:  “He was hard-crust…He used to tell us that doctors could bury their mistakes, but lawyers couldn’t.  And he’d drive home that we would be competing not only with white lawyers but really well-trained white lawyers, so there just wasn’t any point in crying in our beers about being Negroes.”  Hamilton didn’t just teach it – he lived it.  He later joined the NAACP as special counsel and recruited Marshall to be his top assistant.  They traveled the South together to get a first-hand look at the conditions that they would be litigating.  

He had heart disease, and all the stress and work began to weaken his heart. His doctors told him to cut back or just go back to teaching, but he was dedicated to the cause.  He and Marshall joined forces to win important federal cases in Maryland, Missouri, and Oklahoma.  His heart continued to fail, and he had to step down from the NAACP work, with Marshall taking his place.  He died in 1950, four years before one of the powerful fruits of his labor would be litigated before the Supreme Court:  Brown v. Board of Education.  Though he was not with them, it was Charles Houston’s lawyers and Charles Houston’s strategy that brought them to victory in the Brown case.  It was one of the towering labors that led to the end of neo-slavery in 1965.  

At Houston’s funeral in 1950, William Hastie, the first Black man ever appointed as a federal appellate judge, had these words to say about Houston:  “He guided us through the legal wilderness of second-class citizenship.  He was truly the Moses of that journey.  He lived to see us close to the promised land of full equality under the law, closer that even he had dared hope when he set out on that journey, and so much closer than would have been possible without his genius and his leadership.”

In this Black History Month, remember this pioneer – if you’ve never heard of him, look up more about him.  If you know about him, celebrate his work.  And, in a time of the new neo-slavery, the new Jim Crow, let us find our place in that great cloud of witnesses, working with inspiration from people like Charles Hamilton Houston and Ida B. Wells, working towards a time when the idea that all people are created equal will bear fruit for all of us.