The Road to Brown
Film. Producer/Director/Writer: William Elwood. 56 min. 1990.
The little known story of Charles Hamilton Houston who paved the road to Brown v. Board.
Charles Hamilton Houston
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The Road to Brown tells the story of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling as the culmination of a brilliant legal assault on segregation that launched the Civil Rights movement. It is also a moving and long overdue tribute to a visionary but little known black lawyer, Charles Hamilton Houston, “the man who killed Jim Crow.”
The Road to Brown plunges us into the nightmare world of Jim Crow that robbed former slaves of the rights granted by the 14th and 15th Amendments. Under the “separate but equal” doctrine of the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, black citizens were denied the right to vote, to attend white schools, to get sick in white hospitals or to be buried in white cemeteries. Those who objected were liable to be lynched.
Charles Houston, the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, dean of Howard University Law School and chief counsel to theNAACP, launched a number of precedent-setting cases leading up to Brown v. Board of Education. He strategically targeted segregated
