Houston's efforts to dismantle the legal theory of "separate but equal" were completed after his death in 1950 with the historic "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954) ruling, which prohibited segregation in public schools. At one point Houston had carried a movie camera as he traveled across South Carolina, in order to document the inequalities of facilities, materials and teachers' salaries between African-American and white education. As Special Counsel to the NAACP, Houston dispatched Thurgood Marshall, Oliver Hill and other young attorneys to work a litigation campaign of court challenges to equalize teachers' salaries.