18 18 Charles Hamilton Houston (1895–1950) was born in Washington, D.C., and in 1922 he graduated cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he was also the first African American ever elected to be an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Houston later taught at Howard University, where Thurgood Marshall was one of his students, and argued a number of important cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. His primary legacy, however, lay in his work as a key strategist in the legal assault against racial discrimination. Though the Supreme Court’s famous Brown decision to abolish compulsory segregation in public schools did not occur until four years after Houston’s death, he helped shape many of the important legal precedents that led up to this decision. Even a half century after his death, Houston’s reputation as the principal architect of the legal campaign against Jim Crow has continued to grow.
THE NEGRO SOLDIER
I want to speak particularly on the subject of the armed forces. Here, after nearly three years of war, Negroes are still insulted by the Navy’s barring all Negro women, except those now passing for white, from the Waves, the Marines, and the Spars. We have officers in the Army and the Navy; but there is still not a single Negro lieutenant in the United States Marines. The Army puts Negroes in uniform, transports them South and then leaves them to be kicked, cuffed and even murdered with impunity by white civilians. In places, Negro service men do not have as many civil rights as prisoners of war. In at least one Army camp down South for a time there was one drinking fountain for white guards and German prisoners, and a segregated fountain for Negro soldiers. And Negroes know that just as soon as the shooting stops many Americans will give the same Germans, Austrians, Italians, Rumanians and others who were trying to kill them preference over Negroes who were defending them, simply because these Germans and others are white.
Many white service men are talking about what they are going to do to put the Negro in his place as soon as they get back home. Many Negroes are getting to the point of disgust and desperation where they had just as soon die fighting one place as another. Meanwhile enemy propaganda is carrying the stories of racial dissension in the United States to all corners of the earth, and the colored peoples of Asia, Africa and India are getting an eyeful of how white Americans act abroad.
I advocate immediate enlistment of Negro women as Waves, Spars and Marines; assignment and promotion of Negroes in all the armed forces strictly according to service, experience and merit; and the organization of non-segregated combat units on a volunteer basis. The administration of the G.I. Bill of Rights and all other veteran rehabilitation programs must be administered impartially with absolutely no discrimination.
The American color bar unless speedily removed will be the rock on which our international Good Neighbor policy and our pious claim to moral leadership will founder. The moment the peoples of Asia, Africa and India become convinced that our true war aims are to perpetuate the old colonial system with the white man’s heel on the colored man’s neck, and that we are fighting Japan merely to substitute European imperialism in place of Japanese imperialism—that moment we might as well begin preparing for World War III, and World War III will not necessarily be to America’s advantage. The Negro problem gives the United States the opportunity to practice what it preaches, and it is time the country awakens to the fact it is guaranteeing its own salvation by making a substantial down payment on the Four Freedoms at home.
Source: “The Negro Soldier,” reprinted with permission from the Nation 159 (October 21, 1944), pp. 496–97. For subscription information to the Nation, call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week’s Nation magazine can be accessed at www.thenation.com.
Steven H. Hobbs, “From the Shoulders of Houston: A Vision for Social and Economic Justice,” Howard Law Journal 32 (1989).
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1975).
Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).