Transcript: Charles Hamilton Houston and His Legal Challenge Against Jim Crow

Narrator: But with all the gains in housing, jobs, and public facilities, one condition remained unchanged. Segregation was still the rule, not the exception. And in the South, lynchings continued unabated. In the north, the NAACP anti-lynching campaign gained new momentum with a new argument. In a widely circulated brochure, the NAACP reminded the nation of the potential damage to all of its children. "Do not look at the Negro, look at the white children," it said. "What havoc is being wrought in their minds?" For twenty years the NAACP had been crusading against lynching. Now, after years of lobbying, protest, and marching, support for a federal law slowly gained momentum. By 1938, seventy percent of Americans expressed support for the anti-lynching bill. For Walter White it was time to increase pressure on Congress.

Bryan Stevenson: The same arguments that were made by Southern Dixocrats and senators then are the same arguments you hear now. No this is going to empower the Federal government, it's got to be states' rights, you're taking away the autonomy of the states, the 11th Amendment—states and individuals have to be protected from this kind of Federal intrusion, don't take away our states' rights.

Ken Janken: Walter White, not having any luck with senators on the fence, goes to Eleanor Roosevelt and says, "You got to help me here, you got to get the president to speak out on this." I think that Walter really confused being near people with power, with having access to power himself. And ultimately he was disappointed time and again when Franklin Roosevelt wouldn't come through with his promises, when Eleanor Roosevelt, who was extraordinarily influential, couldn't deliver.

Voice of Walter White: The president was frankly unwilling to challenge the Southern leadership. 'I did not choose the tools with which I must work,' he told me. 'If I come out for the anti-lynching bill they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass. I just can't take that risk’.

Harvard Sitkoff: When the federal anti-lynching bill is put before Congress in 1938, it is filibustered to death.

Ken Janken: Walter White would have continued to fight for an anti-lynching law in perpetuity but for Charles Houston's arguments that the law is never gonna pass, don't be so focused on this particular campaign, look at how the NAACP could grow in other areas.

Genna Ray McNeill: Charles Houston wanted to emphasis to Walter White that there was already civil rights legislation and law available. Officers of the law were not supposed to subject persons to loss of life or deprivation of rights. It is a matter of the lives of African-Americans being valued.

Narrator: Houston knew that the Constitution, properly understood and rightly applied, would give black Americans the freedoms they were fighting for. So he took the fight to the courts.

Charles Houston III: My grandfather saw the courts as the ideal way to achieve equality, because if you fought that fight and you won, well, then it would be a legitimate victory and it would be one that would be recognized by everyone, and would have the weight of authority behind it.

Patricia Sullivan: Their hope was to build towards some Supreme Court decisions that would begin to turn the tide and open the way towards challenging segregation in education, and so he had a strategy.

Genna Ray McNeill: Charles Houston having his training from Harvard Law School understood that judges are not going to make decisions that will overturn rulings having to do with constitutional interpretation, unless absolutely necessary. So it was Charles Houston who became the strategist and the architect for a campaign that would gradually dismantle the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 “separate but equal” doctrine.

Patricia Sullivan: So they began to carefully pick cases that they would litigate, pick cases to win.

Narrator: And cases that would establish precedent, cases that in Charles Houston's words, "would make plain the inequality that existed in the educational opportunities of blacks and whites, and would make true equality too expensive for states to maintain." In 1936, Houston and his legal team would find a case with all the right components. Lloyd Gaines, a college graduate, had been denied entrance to the law school at the University of Missouri because of his race. Houston argued that Missouri was obligated to either build a law school for blacks equal to that of whites or admit him to the University of Missouri.

BRYAN STEVENSON: Gaines became the first time when the United States Supreme Court was asked expressly, does a state have an obligation to provide professional education to people of color if there is no professional education available within that state? And the court said, yes, and they ordered the University of Missouri to allow Lloyd Gaines to be admitted and it was incredibly influential.

Narrator: The Gaines case laid the groundwork for Houston's master plan. It would become the basis for the legal battles that would one day bring an end to legalized Jim Crow in America. But this one victory would not be enough for Charles Hamilton Houston. Over the years to come, Houston would pursue cases at every level, fighting against segregation in all aspects of American society.

GENNA RAE MCNEILL: He saw himself as a soldier who needed to work twenty hours a day, and he did so very, very often. Charles Houston III: My grandfather had no tolerance for slackers, or laziness, or excuses. He believed in getting it done no matter...no matter the personal cost.

Charles Houston II: I think my father saw himself as a soldier, as a fighter in a long campaign against, against injustice. He did not stint in his hours or in his travel or in his legal preparation, despite the fact that his health was declining.

Narrator: After suffering two heart attacks, on April 22, 1950, Charles Hamilton Houston died. Charles Houston II: My father on his deathbed in the hospital was given a book written by the attorney Louis Nizer entitled "Peace of Mind." And that in the margin of one of the pages of that book he inscribed to me the message, "Tell Beau" – which was my pet name as a boy – "that I did not run out on him, but that in every fight some fall."

Bryan Stevenson: He died in 1950, so he wasn't around when the historic victories came to light. He wasn't visible during the Civil Rights movement, even during Brown, and because of that he was in too many quarters largely forgotten. But make no mistake, he is the architect. He transformed the legal culture within this country. That kind of courage is essentially what transformed this country. Unless there were a handful of black folks who, after being beat down, were willing to stand up and say, my head is bloodied but not bowed, it would not be possible to imagine change.