Voice of Thurgood Marshall:
I went over to Howard in 1930 and began the law school, and for the first time in my life, I studied. Dean Charles H. Houston, H-O-U-S-T-O-N, was very brilliant, very decent person, but a very hard man. He himself was a perfectionist and he insisted that we each be, and if we did a slip shot job, boy, he would lay it on you.

Sheryll D. Cashin, author and the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University:
Charles Hamilton Houston tells his students you will be basically a social activist using the law, or you will be a parasite. He wanted it to be an engine of change for the race. Houston embodied the two critical characteristics of a classic race man. One, an utter confidence in himself and his people. You will be excellent. You will work hard. You will excel. You will be the best of the best. And the second was sort of this agitator's creed. And you will take that talent and you will use it to improve the lives of other people.

Gilbert King, author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America:
Charles Hamilton Houston just said, "Your briefs have to be perfect. You cannot let down the race by doing something that wasn't at the level of what I expect from you."

Sherrilyn Ifill, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at the Howard University School of Law:
Houston has a vision of what can be created at Howard Law School, not just some attorneys who can go into Black communities and work, because, of course, segregation meant that we needed to have some Black doctors and some Black lawyers and so forth, but that lawyers can see themselves as having this power to transform, to be social engineers, as he would say.

Voice of Thurgood Marshall:
We started to sitting around with Charles Houston, and we began to work out this attack on the segregated school system. We talked about it, we did research on it, we studied it.

Cashin:
The vision was to push these talented young lawyers into litigating to change the world, and Thurgood Marshall drank that Kool-Aid and he worked harder than he ever had in his life, and he ended up being the valedictorian. And he ended up going straight into practicing law with Charles Hamilton Houston. They basically invented the modern civil rights firm.

Ifill:
The idea of the lawyer who spent 100% of their time working on civil rights cases was a 20th-century innovation brought to us by Thurgood Marshall, and later the team that he developed at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Cashin:
The Legal Defense Fund, they are a public interest law firm. They file lawsuits on behalf of individuals and groups that are facing some kind of oppressive situation, and they do it through fundraising. They don't charge their clients.