Influential civil rights lawyer, the man who killed Jim Crow born

Charles Hamilton Houston, lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP Litigation Director born in Washiongton.

Houstono helped play a role in dismantling the Jim Crow laws and helped train future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall.

He is known as "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow." He played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Houston's brilliant plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by using the inequality of the "separate but equal" doctrine (from the Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision) as it pertained to public education in the United States was the masterstroke that brought about the landmark Brown decision.