Genna Rae McNeil
University of North Carolina, Charles Houston Biographer

Charles Houston as Social Engineer
Charles Houston found World War I as a pivotal experience … and he said that in the army they could tell you what your rights and your privileges were, and they had a certain way of handling the issue of justice. He essentially wanted to make certain that he knew for himself all the rules and regulations, and all the laws and all the policies, because if you got caught not knowing then there was a possibility that you might be harmed through what somebody identified as justice. So…when he saw that an African American officer, who had simply followed orders, was later court-martialed and put in the brig, Charles Houston decided then that he was, number one, glad he had not given his life in the Army, and, second, that he was going to learn everything he could about the law, so that he could defend not only his own rights, but the rights of others who had not the opportunity to study the law and to defend themselves.

So because of the lynch violence, the threats, the intimidation, and because of the way in which racial discrimination interfered with having a just verdict, he decided that the thing he was going to have to do was become the best trained lawyer that he could be…and he thought that he would apply to Harvard Law School. He knew about a number of professors there that were beginning to talk about things that had to do with sociological issues in relation to the law, and it was that kind of law that would take into account the realities of the human experience, about which Charles Houston wanted to know, and then wanted to be able to use that in defense and advocacy for his people.

One phrase that Charles Houston used to state all the time, and Oliver Hill still repeats it now: "A Lawyer is either a social engineer or a parasite on society". This was a really different notion than traditional training in law: social engineer in the sense of doing something to remedy the ills of society, of addressing problems that one saw in society…and chief among those problems the apartheid-like conditions of African Americans in the United States".

  

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