Nathan Margold wanted to strike at segregation directly whenever it was connected with inequality, because, of course, Plessy v. Fergusson, the 1896 decision, had said "separate but equal". Nathan Margold, as a white attorney, said in a very logical fashion that if we always show that [separation] is accompanied with inequality, then the Court should see that it cannot countenance this segregation. But Charles Houston understood, in a way that other African Americans understood, that a direct attack on segregation, taking it to the Supreme Court in any immediate way, would not be successful, and the last thing they wanted to do was to use funds in a way that would not create the desired result for the NAACP and for African Americans.

The reason that Charles Houston wanted to use a plan that was different than the plan that had been posed by Nathan Margold, after that wonderful report that Houston studied and greatly appreciated, was that the United States, as Houston understood it, suffered from a major malady, which was something that could not be simply identified as inequality with some personal or private prejudice from time to time, but rather an entire system that supported white supremacy.

Charles Houston, as he saw it and talked about it in 1935, said that discrimination in education was simply symbolic of all the other discrimination, discrimination in every imaginable area of life for African Americans. So they called for a gradual, long-term…a protracted struggle…and always the task was to model a case so that others in other communities would be able to know what steps they could take to deal with inequality in education, which was what they ultimately decided to focus upon first, because of the singular importance of education.

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