Charles Hamilton Houston - Legacy

Legacy

Houston died from a heart attack on April 22, 1950 at the age of 54. He was posthumously awarded the NAACP's Spingarn Medal in 1950 and, in 1958, the main building of the Howard University School of Law was dedicated as Charles Hamilton Houston Hall. His significance became more broadly known through the success of Thurgood Marshall and after the 1983 publication of Genna Rae McNeil's Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

Houston is the person for whom the Charles Houston Bar Association and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School—which opened in the fall of 2005—are named. In addition, there is a professorship at Harvard Law named after him; Elena Kagan, formerly the Dean of Harvard Law School and now an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, was the Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of Law.

Houston was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. In 1991, Barack Obama, then the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, appeared in a minute long infomercial to commemorate Houston. Obama would go on to become the nation's first African-American President of the United States

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Charles Hamilton Houston on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

The C.H. Houston apartment building, formerly owned by Howard University, at 1712 16th St NW, Washington, D.C. was named after Charles Hamilton Houston.

The Washington Bar Association annually awards the Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion of Merit to an individual who has advanced the cause of Houstonian jurisprudence.