born Sept. 3, 1895, Washington, D.C., U.S.
died April 22, 1950, Washington, D.C.
U.S. lawyer and educator.
He graduated from Amherst College and taught for two years at Howard University before serving as an officer in World War I. At Harvard Law School he became the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review . Houston practiced law with his father (1924–50), also serving as special counsel to the NAACP (1935–40). Before the U.S. Supreme Court, in State ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1939), he successfully challenged racial segregation in public schools in areas where no "separate but equal" facilities existed; the decision was a forerunner of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). He was a teacher and mentor of Thurgood Marshall .