Transcript: Charles Hamilton Houston: Laying the Groundwork for Integration

NARRATION: One man – Charles Hamilton Houston – believed that not only could the NAACP do more, it had to take the lead. In 1935 he left his job as the dean of the prestigious law school at Howard University to become the NAACP's first full-time salaried legal counsel in 20 years.

PATRICIA SULLIVAN: Charles Hamilton Houston went to South Carolina with a movie camera and would film, county by county, the black school and the white school, and it was just this visual essay in inequality. But inequality doesn't even describe it. I mean just the…the awful conditions that young black children went to school under. I mean they had …had schoolhouses where there were cracks in the wall, they were crowded together on benches. And then the white school in the same county would have the brick structure, two stories, basketball court. I mean it was just so clearly unequal. And he would use that to show in the North, to kind of get support for the campaign, and really put a face on what segregation meant.

BRIAN STEVENSON: There were still people even in the NAACP who thought that black people simply had to improve their own worlds, and to make them sort of somehow better and more sustainable. Houston said it won't work that way. We have to basically integrate ourselves into all of the public goods and public resources that are around us, and until we do that, we're going to always be considered inferior.

VOICE OF CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON: "Discrimination in education is symbolic of all the more drastic discriminations which Negroes suffer in American life. And these apparent senseless discriminations in education against Negroes have a very definite objective on the part of the ruling whites to curve the young blacks and prepare them to accept an inferior position in American life without protest or struggle. The discriminations practiced against the Negro are no accident." Charles Houston.

NARRATION: Houston was convinced that the battle for civil rights had to be won in the schools, but would have to be fought in the courts.