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more difficult legally to defend state-sponsored, all-white law, professional, and
graduate schools, when no such Black schools existed (as was the case with the
University of Maryland Law School) — that is, even the facade of separate but equal
was absent. Moreover, since it would be very expensive to provide segregated all-
Black graduate and professional schools, the prognosis was that states might have
no choice but to integrate the existing schools, thereby providing precedents for
attacking segregation in lower education and chipping away at the foundations of
Plessy v, Ferguson itself. *
This then was the tactic Houston and his comrades decided on. But this
tactic was part of a much deeper strategy that Houston had been working on for
years, as he revealed when he presented his ideas for the legal campaign to activists
in Baltimore. As Juanita Jackson Mitchell remembered it:
He said that while he was in the Army, taking all that -- the boys call it,
"crap" - but anyway, taking all those insults and the like, he figured out that
with the 14th Amendment equal protection clause we could start hammering
away at this damnable segregation. Especially state-supported segregation.
His proposal was, when he first came and talked to us, that if a state is in the
business of providing education for its citizens, and it excludes a group of
citizens solely because of race, and it doesn't provide them a law school,
then on its face, it has violated the Constitutional right to the equal
protection of the law under the 14th Amendment. And that was so simple
and so clear. Afterwards I thought to myself, why hadn't somebody else
thought of that?25
Activists in Baltimore, including the leadership of the Forum, were
impressed with Houston's proposals, partly because they were convinced by his
strategic and tactical arguments, and partly because they had their own axes to
grind with the University of Maryland. In fact, the opening of this university and its
various schools to Blacks was a demand that had been raised by the freedom
movement repeatedly over the years and was part of what might be considered its
traditional agenda. Increasingly in the early 1930s, this demand was echoed in the
pages of the Afro, in the Friday night meetings of the Forum, and, in 1934, it had
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