{"id":10180,"date":"2022-02-11T07:39:36","date_gmt":"2022-02-11T12:39:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/?p=10180"},"modified":"2022-02-11T07:39:36","modified_gmt":"2022-02-11T12:39:36","slug":"black-history-month-feature-charles-hamilton-houston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/black-history-month-feature-charles-hamilton-houston\/","title":{"rendered":"Black History Month Feature: Charles Hamilton Houston"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Photo credit: Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race &amp; Justice<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Charles Hamilton Houston was one of the most influential figures in Black life between the two world wars. Houston served as a first lieutenant in World War I in France and his experience in the then-racially segregated U.S. Army made him determined to study law in order to fight for civil rights.<\/p>\n<p>Houston earned an undergraduate degree at Amherst College and a law degree at Harvard University, where he became the first Black student to be elected to the editorial board of the <em>Harvard Law Review<\/em>. Houston began taking on civil rights cases after he returned to Washington to join his father\u2019s law firm. Later, as dean of the Howard University Law School, Houston set out to train attorneys who would become civil rights advocates. Houston mentored a generation of young Black lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to become the U.S. Supreme Court\u2019s first Black justice.<\/p>\n<p>After leaving Howard University, Houston served as the first general counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP said Houston\u2019s legal brilliance served to undercut the &#8220;separate but equal&#8221; principle and champion other civil rights cases, earning him the title &#8220;The Man Who Killed Jim Crow.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Houston did not live to see segregation declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1954 in <em>Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>, having died from a heart attack in 1950. Houston was posthumously awarded the NAACP <a href=\"https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/topic\/Spingarn-Medal\">Spingarn Medal<\/a>. The main building of the Howard University School of Law was named Charles Hamilton Houston Hall in 1958. Harvard Law School named a professorship after Houston and, in 2005, opened the <a href=\"https:\/\/charleshamiltonhouston.org\/\">Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Alexandria City Public School\u2019s Jefferson-Houston PreK-8 IB School is a fully authorized International Baccalaureate\u00ae World School named after President Thomas Jefferson and Charles Hamilton Houston.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Charles Hamilton Houston was one of the most influential figures in Black life between the two world wars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":10162,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-acps"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-22 02:06:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10180"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10187,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10180\/revisions\/10187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.acpsk12.org\/staff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}