“The problem before the Negro today is not the depths from which he has come but the heights to which he aspires.”
Charles Hamilton Houston, 1934
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Few people recognize Charles Hamilton Houston’s name.
But we all recognize his legacy
- He was Harvard Law Review’s first black editor
- Howard University’s dean of law
- A father
- A soldier
- An attorney
- The first black man to stand before the United States Supreme Court as a lawyer, instead of a defendant.
- He was chief council to the NAACP and a leading architect of the American civil rights movement.
Charles Hamilton Houston was just one man, but his dedication to fighting racial inequality from within the legal system ended a century of “separate but equal” segregation. He was truly “the man who killed Jim Crow.” And he remains the inspiration behind our work.
