chastised for, during a brief detail as a Judge Advocate, finding a Black sergeant not worthy of prosecution, Houston wrote later: The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was (7/33)
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no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back. After his return to the U.S. in 1919, he entered Harvard Law School. He was the (8/33)
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first [Black] student elected to the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review and graduated cum laude… He earned a bachelor's of law in 1922 and a S.J.D. from Harvard in 1923. That same year he was awarded a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship to study at the University of (9/33)
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Madrid. After his return, he was admitted to the Washington, DC bar in 1924 and joined his father's practice. Career When several [Black] lawyers were refused admission to the American Bar Association in 1925, they founded the National Bar Association... …From 1929 to (10/33)
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1935, Houston served as Vice-Dean and Dean of the Howard University School of Law. He developed the school, beginning its years as a major national center for training [Black] lawyers. He extended its part-time program to a full-time curriculum and gained accreditation (11/33)
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by the Association of American Law Schools and the American Bar Association. Bringing prominent attorneys to the school as speakers and to build a law network for his students, Houston served as a mentor to a generation. (12/33)
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He influenced nearly one-quarter of all the [Black] lawyers in the United States at the time…. Houston believed that the law could be used to fight racial discrimination and encouraged his students to work for such social purpose. Houston left Howard in 1935 to serve (13/33)
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as the first special counsel for the NAACP, serving in this role until 1940. In this capacity he created litigation strategies to attack racial housing covenants and segregated schools, arguing several important civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. (14/33)
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Through his work at the NAACP, Houston played a role in nearly every civil rights case that reached the US Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Houston worked to bring an end to the exclusion of African Americans from juries across the (15/33)
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South. He defended African-American George Crawford on charges of murder in Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1933, and saved him from the electric chair. In the related Hollins v. State of Oklahoma (1935), Houston led an all-[Black] legal team before the US Supreme Court to (16/33)
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appeal another murder case in which the defendant was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to [execution]. The defense team had challenged the all-white jury during the trial, but the conviction was upheld by the appeals court. Hearing the case a certiorari, the (17/33)
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