“[E]xperience has proved that the average white lawyer, especially in the South, cannot be relied upon to wage an uncompromising fight for equal rights for Negroes.” —Charles H. Houston, The Need for Negro Lawyers, 4 J. Negro Educ. 49 (1935).
Charles Houston was a black lawyer of formidable intellect and single-minded determination. He became dean of the Howard University Law School of Law in 1929 and later served as legal counsel for the NAACP in an office later known as the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund or the LDF. He experienced the world of Jim Crow from the opposite side of the color line. For blacks, the dominant issues were submission, humiliation and survival. He knew all too well that even a slight breach of racial etiquette could have lethal consequences. Houston saw the question of race as systemic. Had he lived long enough to read Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” (TKAM) he would have been skeptical of Atticus Finch and indignant at his status as a cultural archetype of racial justice.
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