TV Reviews : ‘The Road to Brown’ Honors an Obscure Hero

Charles H. Houston. For most Americans, the name doesn’t ring a bell. For African Americans who know their history, however, Houston belongs in the same pantheon as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr..

“The Road to Brown” (at 8 tonight on Channel 50, at 9 on Channel 24, at 10 on Channel 28) doesn’t delve into the causes of Houston’s strange obscurity. Producer-director Mykola Kulish’s slightly academic but honorific hourlong portrait of Houston’s legal battles to overturn court-enforced segregation isn’t long enough to ask why Houston has been pushed into the back of history books. Kulish has her hands full simply covering all of the achievements of “the man who killed Jim Crow.”

The son of a lawyer, Houston graduated summa cum laude from a virtually all-white Amherst College, and later was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. But it was his degrading experiences as a World War I officer in a black regiment--including facing off against a lynch mob of white American soldiers in France--that convinced him that racism had to be confronted.

Moreover, he was convinced that it could only be effectively confronted by legal means. “The Road to Brown,” in fact, is most deeply a paean to the virtues of values-based law. Houston is quoted as saying that “a lawyer is either a social engineer, or he is a parasite on society.” At the film’s end, Donald Watkins, counsel to the mayor of Birmingham, Ala., declares: “Laws can changes the quality of life; civil rights lawyers can give life to those laws.”

Houston, as dean of Howard University, planned a long-term strategy against segregation laws by training attorneys, among them Thurgood Marshall, who would become the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice. By insisting on budgetary equality in white and black Southern schools, and then winning cases that established a series of legal precedents, Houston built the groundwork that led to the 1954 landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which demolished “separate but equal” statutes.

Sadly, Houston did not live to see the Brown victory: He died of a weak heart and overwork in 1950. Kulish poignantly shows that, as much as King or the civil rights leaders to follow him, he sacrificed his life for the cause. A hero by anyone’s definition, and a hero who deserves more than a late-night hour on PBS.