ROOT AND BRANCH, EXCERPT

"Had life been a little more fair or comfortable, Thurgood Marshall would not have met Charles Hamilton Houston until years later, perhaps when Houston served as the NAACP's special counsel and Marshall volunteered legal advice to its Baltimore chapter. Howard Law School was for Marshall, as it was for most of its students in 1930, the campus of last resort. The University of Maryland Law School was near his parents' home but did not accept black applicants; his mother dissuaded him from submitting a futile application. He could not afford to go to the northern law schools that admitted a few African Americans each year . Howard Law School was all that remained. This was the first time segregation had determined his course, and it wounded him deeply... "Even before the Crawford trial thrust him to national prominence , Houston was fundamentally changing what it meant for a black person to be a lawyer in the United States. He was enacting sweeping reforms that transformed Howard Law School from what the city's wealthiest black residents called 'a dummy retreat ' into an institution whose uncompromising rigor and singularity of purpose drew comparisons to the military academy at West Point.... "Mordecai Johnson began to search for someone to replace the vice dean of the law school's day program. He sought a scholarly lawyer who believed, as he did, that black folks should no longer depend on white attorneys to wage their legal battles. Their legal war would be won by black attorneys with a blood-stake in their cases' outcomes. Johnson soon settled on a thirty-four year old professor in Howard Law School's evening program who, along with his father, owned a small but prosperous downtown law firm. "At that moment, Charles Hamilton Houston was almost certainly the most academically accomplished African American attorney in history. As the only black student in Amherst's class of 1915, Charlie may have been stunted socially, but his racial isolation had failed to stunt his unwavering drive; he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with highest honors. A few years later at Harvard Law School, he became the first African American member of the law review. Mentored by future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, Houston again graduated with the highest honors offered by his law school. Not content with a lawyer's Juris Doctor, he remained at Harvard to earn a Doctor of Juridical Science, a rarely earned degree equivalent to a Ph.D. in the law. Professor Frankfurter was by now so impressed with him that he recommended him for a prestigious traveling fellowship, which Houston won handily. As a Frederick Sheldon Fellow, Houston studied law at the University of Madrid and traveled through countries in Europe and Africa , before returning to a hometown poorer and more segregated than he had left it. "In Charlie Houston, Mordecai Johnson had found his man. He offered him the job at a salary that, although modest , would allow him to suspend his private practice and dedicate his full professional vigor to revolutionizing the day program at Howard Law School." P. 16-23, "Ambitious , Successful, Hopeful Dreams," ROOT AND BRANCH: CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON, THURGOOD MARSHALL, AND THE STRUGGLE TO END SEGREGATION (2010) by Rawn James, Jr.