When several black lawyers were refused admission to the
American Bar Association in 1925, they founded the
National Bar Association. Houston was a founding member of the affiliated Washington Bar Association. Houston was recruited to the Howard University faculty by the school's first African-American president,
Mordecai Johnson. From 1929 to 1935, Houston served as Vice-Dean and Dean of the
Howard University School of Law. He developed the school, beginning its years as a major national center for training black lawyers. He extended its part-time program to a full-time curriculum and gained accreditation by the Association of American Law Schools and the American Bar Association. 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. He influenced nearly one-quarter of all the black lawyers in the United States at the time, including former student
Thurgood Marshall, who became a United States Supreme Court justice. Houston believed that the law could be used to fight racial discrimination and encouraged his students to work for such social purpose. Houston left Howard in 1935 to serve as the first special counsel for the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving in this role until 1940. In this capacity, he created litigation strategies to combat 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). Houston worked to bring an end to the exclusion of African Americans from juries across the South. He defended African-American George Crawford on charges of murder in
Loudoun County, Virginia, in 1933, and saved him from the electric chair. 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. The defense team had challenged the all-white jury during the trial, but the conviction was upheld by the appeals court. Hearing the case
a certiorari, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision and ordered a new trial. Hollins was tried a third time, again before an all-white jury, and was convicted in 1936. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1950. At the time, Oklahoma and southern states systematically excluded blacks from juries, in part because they were not on the voter rolls, having been
disenfranchised across the South since the turn of the century by state barriers to voter registration. In the 21st century, attorneys continue to have to challenge prosecutorial strategies that exclude blacks from juries. Houston's strategy on public education was to combat
segregation by demonstrating the inequality resulting from the "
separate but equal" doctrine dating from the Supreme Court's
Plessy v. Ferguson (1897). He orchestrated a campaign to force southern districts to build facilities for blacks equal to those for whites, or to integrate their facilities. He focused on law schools because, at the time, mostly males attended them. He believed this would obviate the fears whites expressed that integrated schools would lead to
interracial dating and marriage. In all, ten members of the firm advanced to become judges, including
Theodore Newman and
Wendell Gardner, Jr., the son of Wendell Gardner. Houston also directed the NAACP's campaign to end restrictive housing covenants. In the early 20th century, the organization had won a United States Supreme Court case,
Buchanan v. Warley (1917), which prohibited state and local jurisdictions from establishing restrictive housing. Real estate developers and agents developed restrictive covenants and deeds. The Court ruled in
Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) that such restrictions were the acts of individuals and beyond the reach of the constitutional protections. 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. Following Corrigan, Houston contributed to what was a 22-year campaign, in concert with lawyers he had trained, in order to overturn the constitutionality of restrictive covenants. This was achieved in the US Supreme Court ruling in
Shelley v. Kraemer (1948). The court ruled that "judicial enforcement of private right constitutes state action for the purpose of the fourteenth amendment." == Personal life and death ==