GAZETTE: What factors influenced Houston’s legal strategy?

BROWN-NAGIN: First, a report commissioned by the Garland Fund, in the 1930s, recommended strategies for undermining segregation and thus improving the quality of life and conditions for black Americans; the report became the blueprint that Houston relied on to challenge segregation in schools. Second, Houston had studied at Harvard and was aware of the trend in the law to apply social science to legal strategy to make change. Third, Houston traveled to the South, with his then–law student Thurgood Marshall, and conducted an investigation of the conditions in which African-Americans lived. They visited the schools for black children and saw they were terrible compared with the schools for white children.

GAZETTE: Can you take us through the sequence of legal cases that paved the way for Brown v. Board?

BROWN-NAGIN: The first legal decree issued by a state court was Murray v. Pearson in 1936, involving the University of Maryland Law School. Houston and Marshall attained a legal order stipulating that a black person was entitled to admission to the University of Maryland Law School because he couldn’t otherwise get an equal legal education in the state, and it wasn’t feasible to create a whole new law school for blacks. That was a really important case in and of itself, but also because Thurgood Marshall was from Maryland and had been unable to attend the law school in his state.

There was another case, Gaines v. Canada in 1938, this time involving the University of Missouri School of Law, where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that under the separate-but-equal doctrine, Missouri had to admit a black student or create a second school for blacks.

GAZETTE: Houston also litigated other cases outside education to attack segregation. What was his rationale?

BROWN-NAGIN: Houston wasn’t only interested in education, because segregation encompassed a range of areas — the electoral system, the criminal justice system, housing, employment. Among other cases, Houston litigated a case involving the exclusion of blacks from a labor union. In Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railroad Co. in 1944, he was able to get the Supreme Court to rule that it was unlawful for a union to refuse to represent black workers; unions had a duty to represent all workers.

Houston also litigated racially restrictive housing covenants. He was the lead lawyer in Hurd v. Hodge, the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court case that undermined the legal and policy basis for excluding blacks, Jews, and other people deemed undesirable at the time from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. — Houston’s hometown. Along with Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, the court ruled that judges could not enforce these exclusionary covenants.

Houston argued many other cases before the Supreme Court. He was a remarkable figure, an incredibly brilliant man who laid the foundation for Brown v. Board of Education, the 20th century’s most important constitutional case, holding segregation in schools unlawful.

GAZETTE: And yet, Houston is not as well-known as Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights advocates …

BROWN-NAGIN: Houston is well-known by some academics, lawyers, and students of African-American history, but he certainly is not a popular figure in the way that Thurgood Marshall has become. There are no movies about Houston in the way there are several about Marshall, but it was Houston who laid the building blocks used by his prized student, Marshall, to litigate and win Brown v. Board of Education.

Houston died in 1950, the same year the NAACP went from litigating cases testing Plessy to an all-out attack on segregation in schools. Had he not died, he would have been right there arguing Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court. And it’s a shame that he was not around to take part in the litigation. And yet people should know that it’s Houston, his legal strategy, and his intellectual and political energy behind that work.

GAZETTE: The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice was founded to preserve Houston’s legacy and to continue his unfinished work. Can you explain?

BROWN-NAGIN: The institute’s mission focuses on the unfinished legacy of Houston in education, safety and healing, employment, and other areas because this country has still a long way to go, notwithstanding the fact that formal segregation in education was banished in 1954 and, more generally, through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Despite these formal changes, and as Houston himself knew, there is a big difference between law on the books and law on the ground. The reality is that on the ground, African-Americans and other racial minorities, including students, are disadvantaged in terms of resources and also still are subjected to discrimination, and still need our help.

In education, the Houston Institute hopes to continue to advocate for those students and raise awareness about the forms of discrimination that they face, including schools that tend to have fewer resources than some of the suburban, majority-white schools; teachers who are less experienced; and disproportionate discipline, which funnels some of these students into the criminal justice system, where, again, discrimination and disadvantage are rampant. The Houston Institute, together with UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, recently published a report, Disabling Punishment, that documents the shocking inequalities in school discipline suffered by black students with disabilities. That problem is a part of Charles Hamilton Houston’s unfinished business.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.