By The Editors

John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. was awarded the Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion of Merit on Saturday, May 8, by the Washington Bar Association at its gala Law Day Dinner in the nation’s capitol.

Payton called it “a signal honor,” because the medallion was named after the attorney he described as “the most significant lawyer of the twentieth century.” Houston reorganized the legal department of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored and developed the brilliant strategy and tactics that dismantled the legal underpinnings of racial segregation. A native Washingtonian, he was also a co-founder of the Washington Bar Association, which was organized in 1925 as one of the first black bar associations in the country. At the time, there were fewer than 1,200 black attorneys in the entire United States.s.

As a medallion recipient, Payton joins a list of individuals rich with connections to LDF. In 1976, Thurgood Marshall, a co-founder of LDF, was the recipient of the first medallion awarded. Since then recipients have included such attorneys as Elaine R. Jones, former LDF President and Director-Counsel, William T. Coleman, Jr., and Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., longtime LDF board members, and Harvard Law School Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., who recently joined LDF’s board. U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder made a special appearance to award the medallion to Payton.

Following is the brief speech John Payton gave in accepting the medallion:

This is very special honor. Special because I am a member of and know this bar. Special because I have not only been to this event many times, I was the keynote speaker at this event a few years ago. But very special because it is the Charles Hamilton Houston Medallion. As many of you know, I have been very inspired by Charles Houston. He was the most significant lawyer of the twentieth century. I am not alone of course. Many of us are inspired by his incomparable achievements and by the mission that he set for himself.

Charles Houston lived virtually his entire life without the rights we take for granted. A bleak reality for some, but an energizing reality for him. Because he saw that lawyers could challenge injustice and create rights. He saw the special role that lawyers could play in the fight for justice.

Take Howard Law School. Some of you are graduates of Howard. I taught there a few years ago. Howard Law School existed before Houston took the reigns in 1929. It was an unaccredited night law school. He transformed it into an accredited full time law school. But here is the really significant thing: he gave Howard Law School a mission, unique for a law school, of transforming this country into a racially inclusive and just country. That mission is predicated on a view that lawyers can in fact make a difference with respect to racial justice.

Take the NAACP. The NAACP had participated in important cases prior to Houston, but when he was hired as its first full time legal counsel in 1935 he changed everything. He added staff and created a legal department whose purpose was the destruction of white supremacy. He crafted a legal strategy, brought his star student from Howard Law School, Thurgood Marshall, won the first Supreme Court cases on the Road to Brown, and began the process of creating the rights that we all take for granted today. He then turned it over to Thurgood. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund was completely unique when Marshall separately incorporated LDF in 1940 as an independent law firm.

We were the first civil rights law firm in American history, and we remain the finest. These are astonishing achievements. I went to law school because I thought of lawyers as having the power to challenge injustice and to develop equal rights. I did not know it at the time, but Charles Houston was responsible for lawyers playing that role. He did that. I would bet that most of us in this room went to law school with that same vision of our possibilities.

A year ago people were talking about us being a post -racial society. A wishful and even dangerous unreality. Though we have made incredible progress in eradicating discrimination, we are certainly not post-racial.

The election of Barack Obama as President was a watershed event, but it did not solve our problems of racial justice and equality, though it did rekindle and bring to the surface some of the old distrust and hatred that we all know well.

You know what I am talking about.

This is not just another bar association. The Washington Bar Association was founded in 1925 by, among others, Charles Houston. There was then in existence a Negro Lawyers Association. It was basically a social organization. The Washington Bar Association, this Bar association, in contrast, was founded to play a role in the fight for justice and equality.

We are all so used to the idea that lawyers can seek and obtain justice that we do not realize how radical that idea, Charles Houston’s idea, really was. The American Bar Association, for most of its existence, opposed that very idea. This bar association was created to embody that idea.

I want to end with a quote from Charles Houston. He died in 1950, before Brown, but after the cases comprising Brown had been filed. He would have filed the District of Columbia case – Bolling v. Sharpe, but he was too ill. The year before he died, in 1949, he looked back on the decades of struggle against racial segregation. This is Houston:

“There come times when it is possible to forecast the results of a contest, of a battle, of a lawsuit all before the final event has taken place. So far as our struggle for civil rights is concerned, the struggle for civil rights is won.”

Houston had concluded that we were well on our way to establishing legal rights. But he continued:

“What I am more concerned about is that the Negro shall not be content simply with demanding an equal share in the existing system, it seems to me that his historical challenge is to make sure that the system [that] shall survive in the United States of America shall be a system which guarantees justice and freedom for everyone.”

Charles Houston saw that the larger battle was to ensure that there is a “system that guarantees justice and freedom for everyone.” That is the larger mission of the Legal Defense Fund, and it is the larger responsibility of all of us in this room tonight as well.

We all have work to do.

Thanks, everyone.