For Charles Houston, the training of black lawyers was a key to mounting a successful attack on segregation. While at Harvard, Houston wrote that �there must be Negro lawyers in every community� and that �the great majority� of these lawyers �must come from Negro schools.� It was, he concluded, �in the best interests of the United States� to provide the best teachers possible� at law schools where Negroes might be trained. Houston decided to seek a teaching position at Howard Law School, which since its establishment in 1869 had trained three-fourths of the black lawyers in the United States. He enlisted notable members of the Harvard faculty, including Dean Roscoe Pound and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to write letters in support of his application. Pound�s letter assured Howard that Houston �gives promise of becoming a real legal scholar.� In the fall of 1924, Professor Charles Houston began teaching �Agency,� �Surety and Mortgages,� �Jurisprudence,� and �Administrative Law� to first- and second-year law students at Howard. Houston demanded a lot from his students. He had no tolerance for laziness and rejected out of hand complaints about assignments being too long. Houston told first-year students�as he had been told at Harvard–to �look to your left and look to your right�next year one of you won�t be here.� Houston strove to make Howard into the sort of intellectually rigorous center of learning he saw at Harvard.
As the single most important person in the deveolpment of the NAACP’s early legal strategy, of Howard Law School and the death of Jim Crow…Mr. Houston was a tireless advocate for African Americans. While many people don’t know his name certainly most are living more comfortably because of his accomplishments.