The long road to equality: the product of Black legal skill and strategy, Brown has a Black copyright.

Nation, The, May, 2004 by Carter, Robert L.

In the early 1930s the NAACP took on as its primary mission the elimination of segregation in public education, from primary school to the highest reaches of the state university system, including the graduate and professional schools. Charles Houston was hired as NAACP counsel to undertake this assignment.

Houston viewed the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution as the black Magna Carta. He was convinced that the strategic use of test cases to challenge the constitutional validity of racial discrimination in the various areas of American life would eventually put that detriment to blacks beyond the pale.

In 1929 Houston became dean of Howard University Law School and transformed his idea into school policy. For at least the next decade the...

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