Independent Lens

Thurgood Marshall was a graduate of Lincoln University, a black college, where he was not an exceptional student, and by all accounts, this was from general lack of interest in his studies. Thurgood Marshall was widely regarded to be someone who had a big personality and someone who could persuade people by charm. These are some of the raw skills that Charles Hamilton Houston took and refined and turned into one of the most significant lawyers of our generation. Shortly after Thurgood Marshall graduates from Howard Law School, he and Dean Houston take a road trip, and they head into the recesses of the deep South.

soft piano music

They are charged by the NAACP with documenting the conditions in which black children go to school in the southern states. Charles Hamilton Houston was a big techie. Anything that came out, the new technology that came out, he wanted to have it, and in Charles Hamilton Houston's car they have a typewriter, a camera... and a film camera.

camera whirring

This was their first exposure to the conditions deep in Georgia and northern Florida and Alabama. They'd not seen that before. Houston and Marshall were able to film white students on the buses going to school. And then they were able to contrast that by showing black students walking to school. There were not bathrooms-- there were not even outhouses at some of these buildings. Houston and Marshall brought the film back from the deep South to NAACP headquarters in New York City. The Constitution says that the separation of the races is okay as long as that separation is equal. Houston has a plan. It's an incredibly bold plan. He's going to attack segregation, ironically, by supporting it. So the strategy that Houston devised was that he was going to argue that they needed to enforce separate but equal by forcing the states to actually make their facilities, that were already separate, equal.