Not only does this important book remind us that ordinary Americans made the movement, it also reminds us of the role played by the Constitution of the United States. That document provided the framework within which people could act to change the nation for the better. The story of the civil rights movement is a great testament to the Constitution’s strength. Although, as you will see here, that code of law had for some time been bent and twisted to deny black Americans their rights, it also provided the basic tool used by the movement to win justice. Even when movement activists broke local laws, they remained conscious of their adherence to the Constitution’s provisions. They knew that segregation was wrong on the basis of the nation’s highest law. People were willing to go to jail, to fight through the legal system for change, because the Constitution was their ultimate shield.
The era from 1954 to 1965 stands in sharp contrast to the complexity of the years that followed. The movement’s philosophy had been one of nonviolence and commitment to achieving change within the American system of law. After 1965, that vision became clouded. The post-1965 rage of many blacks and the fires their anger left burning across America’s cities sometimes obscure the glory of the movement’s earlier years. I viewed an early screening of the film version of Eyes on the Prize with my children, and afterward my then seventeen-year-old son asked me where the more militant blacks had been during the 1950s when blacks were told to sit in the back of the bus or were refused service at a hamburger stand. I told him that many were on the sidelines. They always insisted they would not take any insults, that they would fight back. But when it came time for sit-ins or freedom rides, they stood aside, explaining they were too violence-prone to act nonviolently.
Some of that empty anger can still be heard today. People ask what the civil rights movement has done to help black America. There is still a great gulf between blacks and whites in educational attainment and income. Poverty and unemployment beleaguer a great many, and the birthrate among unmarried black women is high. The travails of black America continue despite the best efforts of the civil rights movement and in spite of the accomplishments it can claim. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and discrimination continues to press heavily on black America. This book is critically important to this nation today, 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, because it reminds every reader that black Americans have shown great tenacity and courage in continuing to strive for their rights as Americans, despite this national legacy.
Eyes on the Prize is a vital and necessary book for everyone who wants to understand what it means to live in this American democracy. This book is a close, precise look at the years 1954–1965. It is also lively, compelling reading. It reminds us of the great potential we all have as Americans to change our world. It is about Americans who were willing to risk their jobs, their homes, and even their lives to create an extraordinary movement. Between 1954 and 1965, an ever-widening group of Americans marched, picketed, demonstrated, and organized to bring about an end to legal segregation. The social movements of the sixties—the antiwar movement, the women’s movement, and others—all followed in the wake of the civil rights movement. We have now gained perspective on America’s civil rights years and can begin to appreciate the enormity of the accomplishment.
—Julian Bond
Chapter One
God Bless the Child
The Story of School Desegregation
“A lawyer’s either a social engineer, or he’s a parasite on society.”
Charles Houston, 1935
Black and white fourth graders in Washington, D.C., 1954.
Although Charles Houston carried a 16-mm movie camera with him wherever he went, no one would mistake him for a typical northern tourist visiting the South. First, he was a black man, and blacks didn’t take sightseeing trips through the South in 1935. Second, he wasn’t filming the scenic countryside or historic Civil War sites. His subject was schools: the buildings, teachers, buses, and students. Charles Houston was vice dean of Howard University’s School of Law in Washington, D.C. He was recording the dramatic disparity between black schools and white schools in South Carolina. In that state, as in all southern states, black children were not allowed to attend the same schools as white children.
Houston was filming for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1930, South Carolina spent ten times as much on educating each white child as on each black child. Other southern states did little better—Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama devoted five times more money to the education of white children than to that of black children.
Houston knew that it would take more than statistics to convince a nation that segregation was wrong. His film showed what those statistics meant to the lives of some of the twelve million blacks in America, nine million of whom lived in the South. He contrasted the unheated cabins and tarpaper shacks that served as schools for black children with the tidy brick and stone structures where white children learned.
Houston called his documentary, “Examples of Educational Discrimination Among Rural Negroes in South Carolina.” He used it as a teaching tool for his law students at Howard University, as a documentary when he spoke on college campuses or at NAACP events, and as another piece of the argument he was preparing on the racial injustice in America’s schools—an argument he planned to take to court. His name may be little known, but the results of his efforts were profound.
Charles Hamilton Houston was born on September 3, 1895, eight months before the Supreme Court decided the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. This case essentially told the South that segregation was legal. Houston would spend most of his adult life fighting to overturn that decision.
The only child of William Houston and Mary Hamilton, Charlie (as he was known) received the best education a young black child could then expect in segregated Washington, D.C. At the turn of the century, there was a severe housing shortage in the nation’s capital. Thousands of blacks lived on the streets with little or no medical attention. Jobs for minorities were scarce, and separate facilities for blacks—beaches, restaurants, schools—were the unwavering custom. But Charlie’s parents made sure their son was well educated. His mother left her job as a schoolteacher to take better-paying work as a hairdresser. His father attended Howard University in the evening, earned a law degree, and established a successful law practice serving middle-class blacks in Washington.
Mary Hamilton Houston was proud of her race. Although she looked white, she always made it clear that she was a Negro. Her clients in Washington were among the wealthiest and most powerful whites in the city. Mrs. Houston refused to allow her white clients to call her by her first name as they did most blacks in their service, and she always insisted on entering their homes through the front door.
William Houston worked diligently to secure a better life for his family. He eventually became a part-time instructor at Howard University. With what he earned from his law practice, Mary’s income from her hairdressing trade, and an economical lifestyle, the Houstons were able to move into one of Washington’s black middle-class neighborhoods.
Charlie Houston with his parents, William Houston and Mary Hamilton, 1915.
Charlie Houston attended one of the finest all-black high schools in the country, where he became class valedictorian. Unlike most other black high schools, which were essentially vocational trade schools, the M Street High School’s curriculum was based on college entrance requirements. There was no question that William and Mary would send their son to college.
At age sixteen Charlie left Washington to attend Amherst College in Massachusetts. He was the only black student in the class of 1915. Though his social life was limited, he proved himself academically. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with honors.
Houston returned to Washington to decide what to do with his life. His father helped him secure a position as the temporary replacement for a Howard English instructor on leave. Charlie taught the usual English cou
rses, but also developed a new one: Negro Literature.
Shortly before the United States entered World War I, Charlie knew that he would probably be drafted. He did not relish the thought of fighting to make the world safe for democracy when America was neither safe nor democratic for its black citizens. He knew that, as a black man, he would be assigned to a segregated unit and kept on labor details. Houston decided that if he had to go into the army, he would go as an officer. Arguing that the army’s all-black units should be led by black officers and not by whites as was the custom, Houston and other Howard faculty members and students petitioned the federal government to establish a black officers’ training camp. Through persistence they were successful, and in 1916, at age twenty-one, Houston left Washington for officers’ training camp in Des Moines, Iowa.
William Houston had always hoped that Charlie would one day join him at his law firm. But as dearly as he loved his father, Charlie was uncertain whether he wanted to enter the legal profession. The injustices he witnessed in the army helped him make up his mind.
In the army, Houston became a judge-advocate in military cases involving blacks. Essentially, a judge-advocate acted as a prosecuting attorney, digging up evidence to support a guilty verdict. But Houston learned that it didn’t take much evidence to successfully prosecute black soldiers. In one case, after a thorough investigation, he concluded there was insufficient evidence to convict. The defendants were acquitted and, much to his surprise, Houston was told by his white commanding officer that he was “no good.” The judge-advocate was expected to secure a conviction even without adequate evidence. In an even more disturbing case, Houston was appalled to watch the army summarily destroy the military career of an exemplary black officer and sentence him to a year of hard labor for disorderly conduct and insubordination. The inequity of the army’s judicial system and the disproportionate harshness of the sentence raised Houston’s ire. He later wrote, “I made up my mind that I would never get caught again without knowing something about my rights; that if luck was with me, and I got through this war, I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.”
Houston survived a tour of duty in France. On his return to Washington, he witnessed a series of race riots in his overcrowded hometown. He had returned to a country where black veterans were not always thanked for their efforts abroad. Blacks were attacked and even lynched in the South by whites who believed they had to be “put back in their place.” Determined to “fight for those who could not strike back,” Houston applied to Harvard University Law School. Once again he left Washington for Massachusetts, arriving in Cambridge in the fall of 1919.
1st Lt. Charles Hamilton Houston, 368th Infantry, American Expeditionary Forces, 1918.
An outstanding student, Charlie was the first black elected to the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review. He studied under Dean Roscoe Pound, then one of the leading proponents of “sociological jurisprudence,” a new approach to law that relied on sociological evidence as well as legal precedent when arguing a case. Another of Houston’s mentors was Felix Frankfurter, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and later a justice of the United States Supreme Court. Houston received his law degree in 1922 and continued at Harvard on scholarship, earning a doctoral degree a year later.
In 1924, Houston joined his father’s law firm, fulfilling the elder Houston’s long-held wish. The two had very different working styles. William, though a generous man, did not believe in giving free legal advice. “The services rendered are worthy of the fee,” he would often say. He ran the office in a businesslike fashion—checking the accounts, balancing the books, and cutting back on expenses whenever and wherever possible. Charlie, on the other hand, took on cases for which the firm could expect little or no payment. For him the law was a tool for aiding the oppressed. But the divergent temperaments of father and son never hampered their close relationship.
Charlie began teaching again at Howard University, this time in the School of Law. He wanted not only to practice the law but to train others in it as well. Houston believed that black people needed black lawyers to represent them. He believed that if the legal system were to change, it would be because of the disciplined and consistent pressure exerted by a cadre of black lawyers.
Howard University, in Washington, D.C., was the largest all-black college in the United States. The college was established in 1867 to educate blacks excluded from other universities because of the color of their skin. While Harvard and a few other northern colleges offered admission to a select number of blacks, not a single southern white university opened its doors to black students.
Howard’s law school would be pivotal if blacks were ever to make the justice system work for them. Houston’s first years as a law professor could not be described as brilliant, but he quickly became a proficient teacher, and he developed a conviction that the legal education of blacks must be improved.
“The real problem in those days,” says James Nabrit, whom Houston eventually convinced to join Howard’s faculty, “was that we didn’t have the facilities to argue these [civil rights] cases … We didn’t have the lawbooks, we didn’t have the precedent cases, we didn’t have the sample briefs and records of procedure, and we couldn’t use the facilities or contacts of the bar associations since they wouldn’t let us belong.” At that time, blacks were not admitted to the local Washington affiliate of the all-white American Bar Association. Houston realized the importance of continuing education for lawyers and of a local bar association with a well-stocked library. With a handful of other D.C. lawyers, he established the Washington Bar Association for blacks.
In 1927, Houston was named director of a national survey conducted by Howard University on the training and activities of black lawyers in America. Perhaps the study’s most telling finding was that America had few black lawyers well versed in constitutional law. Without a thorough understanding of the Constitution, a lawyer could not successfully argue civil rights cases in federal court. Houston convinced Howard’s president, Mordecai Johnson, that the university should offer a fully accredited, full-time law program, and that a thorough understanding of constitutional law should be mandatory for all students.
Black schools in the South.
“In all our classes,” says Edward P. Lovett, one of Houston’s students who later worked with him, “whether it was equity or contracts or pleadings, stress was placed on learning what our rights were under the Constitution and statutes—our rights as worded and regardless of how they had been interpreted to that time. Charlie’s view was that we had to get the courts to change.”
In 1929, at age 34, Houston was appointed vice dean of Howard’s law school. He was asked, in effect, to turn the school around.
Because so few of Howard’s law students could afford full-time tuition, most worked days and attended classes at night, just as Houston’s father had. But the flexibility of Howard’s curriculum came at a price. Howard law school graduates were mocked by judges for the poor quality of their work. The school’s reputation was dubious and it was not accredited by the American Bar Association.
Reforming Howard’s law program would not be easy. First, Houston closed down the night school, causing newspapers to editorialize bitterly against him. How were poor blacks to afford law school now? Wasn’t this the program his own father had attended? Houston’s response was firm: If students couldn’t afford to attend full-time, they could work full-time and save money to attend in the future.
Houston also tightened the entrance requirements. He traveled throughout the country looking for the most promising black undergraduates to recruit for Howard, and he accepted only the best. He hired eminent legal scholars as guest lecturers and, after scrutinizing the curriculum, decided to extend the academic year. As he phased out the evening law program, Houston also phased out the part-time faculty. He demoted one full-time professor to instructor and invited respected black legal scholars to join the faculty.
/> Within two years of Houston’s reign, the American Bar Association gave Howard Law School full accreditation, and the Association of American Law Schools elected the school to membership without qualification.
As vice dean, Charles Houston demanded much from his students. Thurgood Marshall, a Houston student who went on to become a Supreme Court justice, once said, “First off, you thought he was a mean so-and-so. He used to tell us that doctors could bury their mistakes, but lawyers couldn’t. And he’d drive home to us that we would be competing not only with white lawyers but really well-trained white lawyers, so there just wasn’t any point in crying in our beer about being Negroes. And I’ll tell you—the going was rough. There must have been thirty of us in that class when we started, and no more than eight or ten of us finished up. He was so tough we used to call him ‘Iron Shoes’ and ‘Cement Pants’ and a few other names that don’t bear repeating. But he was a sweet man once you saw what he was up to. He was absolutely fair, and the door to his office was always open. He made it clear to all of us that when we were done, we were expected to go out and do something with our lives.”
Eyes on the Prize Page 2
