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)
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)
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)
Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision and ordered a new trial. Hollins was tried a third time, again before an all-white jury, and was convicted in 1936. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1950. At the time, Oklahoma and southern states (18/33)
systematically excluded [Black People] from juries, in part because they were not on the voter rolls, having been disenfranchised across the South since the turn of the century by state barriers to voter registration. In the 21st century, attorneys continue to have to (19/33)
challenge prosecutorial strategies that exclude [Black People] from juries. Houston's strategy on public education was to attack segregation by demonstrating the inequality resulting from the "separate but equal" doctrine dating from the Supreme Court's Plessy v. (20/33)
Ferguson (1897). He orchestrated a campaign to force southern districts to build facilities for [Black People] equal to those for whites, or to integrate their facilities. He focused on law schools because, at the time, mostly males attended them. He believed this would (21/33)
obviate the fears whites expressed that integrated schools would lead to interracial dating and marriage. {Why have such whites never considered putting in place programs to make white people better human beings and therefore more attractive to each other bc that would (22/33)
have dismantled privilege more quickly.] In Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1939), Houston argued that it was unconstitutional for Missouri to exclude [Black People] from the state's university law school when, under the "separate but equal" provision, (23/33)
no comparable facility for [Black People] existed within the state. In the documentary "The Road to Brown", Hon. Juanita Kidd Stout described Houston's strategy related to segregated schools: When he attacked the "separate but equal" theory his real thought behind it (24/33)
was that "All right, if you want it separate but equal, I will make it so expensive for it to be separate that you will have to abandon your separateness." And so that was the reason he started demanding equalization of salaries for teachers, equal facilities in the (25/33)