[3] He recruited young lawyers to work on the NAACP's litigation campaigns, building connections between Howard's and Harvard's university law schools.

[5] He studied at Amherst College beginning in 1911, was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society,[1] and graduated as valedictorian in 1915 at the age of 20, the only black student in his class.

After being chastised for, during a brief detail as a Judge Advocate, finding a Black sergeant not worthy of prosecution, Houston wrote later: The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them.

Bringing prominent attorneys to the school as speakers and to build a law network for his students, Houston served as a mentor to a generation.

In this capacity he created litigation strategies to attack racial housing covenants and segregated schools, arguing several important civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Through his work at the NAACP, Houston played a role in nearly every civil rights case that reached the US Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

He defended African-American George Crawford on charges of murder in Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1933, and saved him from the electric chair.

[11] In the related Hollins v. State of Oklahoma (1935), Houston led an all-black legal team before the US Supreme Court to appeal another murder case in which the defendant was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to death.

[13][14] Houston's strategy on public education was to attack segregation by demonstrating the inequality resulting from the "separate but equal" doctrine dating from the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson (1897).

[20][19] Houston's efforts to dismantle the legal theory of "separate but equal" were completed after his death in 1950 with the historic Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruling, which prohibited segregation in public schools.

At one point Houston had carried a movie camera as he traveled across South Carolina, in order to document the inequalities of facilities, materials and teachers' salaries between African-American and white education.

As Special Counsel to the NAACP, Houston dispatched Thurgood Marshall, Oliver Hill and other young attorneys to work a litigation campaign of court challenges to equalize teachers' salaries.

As the NAACP continued with its campaign in the 1940s, Houston drew from contemporary sociological and other studies to demonstrate that such covenants and resulting segregation produced conditions of overcrowding, poor health, and increased crime that adversely affected African-American communities.

The court ruled that "judicial enforcement of private right constitutes state action for the purpose of the fourteenth amendment.