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Baltimore which resulted in special links between the freedom movements in these
two border cities. And Charles Houston had been much involved in the D.C.
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movement.
In 1935, Houston was in the process of leaving his position as dean of
Howard Law School to become the full-time special counsel to the NAACP
national office and to head up the organization's legal work. He and the NAACP
leadership were contemplating a major legal campaign against segregation. The
NAACP had just received a $10,000 grant from the American Fund for Public
Service, a New York-based philanthropy headed by Roger Baldwin, to work for
improved African American education. The NAACP decided to use this money to
challenge segregated and unequal schooling for Blacks. Because of his knowledge
of Maryland, because of the support he felt he could expect from the Baltimore
freedom movement (despite the fact that the local NAACP chapter was all but
moribund), and because he felt that Maryland, as a border state, was ripe for a
legal challenge to its schools, Houston decided to make Maryland his "legal
laboratory." Consequently the first case taken up in the new NAACP legal
0-3
campaign was opening the University of Maryland Law School to Black students/0
The choice of the University of Maryland Law School as a target
represented an intersection of a number of national and local interests and
calculations. At first glance, the a focus on a law school, given the massive
deprivation suffered by African Americans at the most basic educational levels,
might seem to be a highly elitist strategy. However, in its conception, the opposite
was true. Tactically, it was decided that higher education, especially graduate and
profession schools, were the weakest links, legally speaking, in the system of
segregated education. It would be, the argument went, possible for states to
convince the courts that their segregated primary and secondary school systems
complied with the "separate but equal" rule of the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v.
Ferguson decision, the reigning doctrine of the day. It would, however, be much
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