Charles Hamilton Houston, a leading African American civil rights lawyer and legal educator, was born on September 3, 1895. He graduated as a valedictorian from Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1915. After teaching at Howard University in Washington, D.C., for two years, he served as a U.S. Army officer in World War I. During the war he witnessed widespread discrimination against black soldiers, leading him to the conclusion that racial discrimination and segregation had to be attacked through the legal system. Accordingly, in 1919 he enrolled at Harvard University and, after completing a doctorate in law in 1923, entered private practice while returning to Howard University to teach part-time in the law school. In 1929 he was named vice-dean of the law school, though he was dean in all but title. In 1935 he moved to New York City to become litigation director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). That year, in an article in the Crisis titled “Educational Inequalities Must Go!,” he announced the NAACP’s strategy of attacking racial segregation by focusing on public education. In 1938 he returned to private practice in Washington, D.C., where he focused on civil rights litigation. Following his early death on April 22, 1950, he was eulogized by Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as the driving force behind the legal challenges that dismantled the Jim Crow system of racial segregation the U.S. Supreme Court had sanctioned in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson.