On Saturday, Feb. 21, the United States Postal Service released a new commemorative stamp in honor of lawyer and noted social justice reformer Charles Hamilton Houston ’22.
The Houston stamp is part of the Postal Service’s Civil Rights Pioneer stamp sheet, a series of six 42-cent First Class stamps honoring 12 civil rights pioneers.
The stamps were dedicated by U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors member Thurgood Marshall Jr., son of the late Supreme Court justice, during the annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in New York City. To celebrate the occasion locally, HLS’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice hosted a panel discussion at the Zero Arrow Theater in Boston.
The panel, moderated by Professor Charles Ogletree ’78, founder and executive director of the Houston Institute, focused on Houston’s legacy and brought together representatives from a variety of institutions with which Houston was involved. Speakers included Charles Hamilton Houston, Jr., Houston’s son and a lecturer at Morgan State University; Jean M. McGuire, executive director of the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity; Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, Md. and now dean of Howard University School of Law; and John Payton, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
The Houston stamp includes a portrait of Houston and Walter White, a leader of the NAACP. Other stamps in the series honor Ella Baker, Daisy Gatson Bates, J.R. Clifford, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ruby Hurley, Mary White Ovington, Joel Elias Spingarn, Mary Church Terrell, Oswald Garrison Villard and Walter White.