Charles Hamilton Houston

The pursuit of justice and equality in the District is inseparable from the legacy of Charles Hamilton Houston. A legal luminary and the architect of the strategy that would lead to the desegregation of American schools, Houston’s tenure as a professor at Howard University Law School, and his work with the NAACP, laid the legal groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement. His doctrine that “a lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society,” challenged his students, including Thurgood Marshall, to use the law as a tool for societal change, a principle that reverberates through the capital’s legal institutions today.