Joseph's great-uncle Theodore Wright Lewis (1853–1922), an AME pastor who served churches in Iowa, Illinois and Kansas was one of the founding members of the NAACP in the Davenport, Iowa and Rock Island, Illinois area.

During World War II, he commanded Filipino troops and ran a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

[6] After his discharge, Howard resumed his education at the University of Iowa and graduated in 1950 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

During a 1944 game against the Indiana University, his coach yelled out to the Iowa defense: "We gotta stop that nigger", referring to the opposing team's running back.

Later at the Drake University Law School, he became the first African-American student admitted to the Phi Alpha Delta legal fraternity.

[1] Maryland governors had been slow to appoint blacks to the bench, even though the city was majority African American.

He won by 8,000 votes over his nearest competitor,[1] and became the first African-American to run for and win a seat on that bench.

[6] In 1992, after Howard was diagnosed with Shy–Drager syndrome, a progressive failure of the autonomic nervous system, he took a reduced case load.