MISSOURI EX REL. GAINES V. CANADA

On January 4, 1936, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched its sustained challenge against state-imposed school segregation by filing a petition for a writ of mandamus for Lloyd L. Gaines against the University of Missouri to gain admission for him to its law school. The university had refused to admit Gaines the previous September because of his race. Missouri had no law school for African Americans, who were barred from all graduate and professional schools in the state. So Gaines's attorneys, Sidney R. Redmond, Henry D. Espy, and Charles Hamilton Houston, on March 27 filed a new suit, Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, to force the university to admit him.

This struggle was spurred by the NAACP's unprecedented victory in 1935 in the case of Donald Gaines Murray, a Baltimore resident, who had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because he was black. Representing Murray, Charles Houston, the NAACP's special counsel, and Thurgood Marshall, a young attorney with the Baltimore NAACP branch, won a writ of mandamus from the Baltimore City Court ordering the university to admit Murray at once. The attorneys sued within the "separate but equal" concept that the U.S. Supreme Court established in the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896. The university had offered to pay for Murray's education at an institution outside Maryland, but he rejected the offer. Upholding the Baltimore City Court's order, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that duly qualified African Americans "must at present" be admitted to the one school provided for the study of law—the law school of the University of Maryland." The university had contended that the law school was not a governmental agency and that provisions for racial segregation in education automatically excluded African Americans. But Maryland's high court held that "there is no escape from the conclusion that the school is now a branch or agency of the state government." The university did not appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Murray was admitted without further incident.

The Gaines case, however, did reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Gaines was a citizen of Missouri and had graduated from Missouri's Lincoln University, a Jim Crow school. Reaffirming the lower court's denial of his application, the Missouri Supreme Court explained that under state law, Lincoln University could "open any necessary school or department" its curators deemed advisable. Where no alternative had been provided, the state was required to pay the African-American resident's tuition "at any university of any adjacent state." Kansas, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska, it noted, all had law schools that admitted blacks. Gaines was therefore accorded equal protection of law. Thus the Supreme Court of Missouri denied him relief.

The U.S. Supreme Court, however, reversed the state court's decision. Writing for the six to two majority in what The Crisis considered "the most significant victory for Negro rights in the highest court of the land in the past decade," (January 1939) Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes concluded, "The admissibility of laws separating the races in the enjoyment of privileges afforded by the State rests wholly upon the equality of the privileges which the laws give to the separated groups within the State. The question here is not of a duty of the State to supply legal training, or of the quality of the training which it does supply, but of its duty when it provides such training to furnish it to the residents of the State upon the basis of an equality of right." Consequently, Gaines "was entitled to be admitted to the law school of the State University in the absence of other and proper provision for his legal training within the State." Unlike Murray in Maryland, Gaines did not enter the law school. He disappeared and was not seen again.

The precedent established the test for all educational facilities in the country and applied to the nineteen states and the District of Columbia that maintained separate schools for the races in the section of the country where almost 80 percent of African Americans lived. The Gaines decision was a major step on the road to the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The opinions in the series of cases from Gaines to Brown defined the constitutional rights of African Americans as citizens. They furthermore broadened the interpretation of constitutional rights for all citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment in ways that eventually also extended civil liberties to whites, women, the elderly, gays, and the disabled.

See Also: HOUSTON, CHARLES; NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE (NAACP); SUPREME COURT.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Gaines Case Won." The Crisis (January 1939): 10.

"The Inevitable Mr. Gaines." The Crisis (February 1939): 51.

Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education, the Epochal Supreme Court Decision that Outlawed Segregation, and of Black America's Century-long Struggle for Equality under Law. 1976.

Marshall, Thurgood. "Equal Justice Under Law." The Crisis (July 1939): 199–201.

Miller, Loren. The Petitioner: The Story of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro. 1966.

Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada et al., 305 U.S. 337. NAACP Annual Report, 1935.

New York Times, 13 December 1938, sec. I, p. 24.

New York Times, 18 December 1938, sec. IV, p. 10.

"Press Comment on the Gaines Case." The Crisis (February 1939): 52–53, 61.

"University of Missouri Case Won." The Crisis (January 1939): 10–12, 18.

DENTON L. WATSON