Legal News

After Leading Civil Rights Triumph, Black Legal Hero Was Never Found

By Chris Herring

The amount of recognition Lloyd Gaines receives will likely never match the size of his contribution to civil rights in America, but a story in Sunday's NYT probably helped narrow the gap somewhat. Click here to read it.

The piece points out that Gaines, a black man, sued the state of Missouri in 1936 for the right to attend the law school of its flagship university, the University of Missouri. The suit came during a time when the school, along with most other state schools there, largely denied blacks the opportunity to study law.

Mr. Gaines won the case, 6-2, when it reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1938. Known as Gaines v. Canada, the ruling is seen as the groundwork for the famous Brown v. Board decision in 1954.

He won the case in part because the court deemed there were no other schools for blacks only that could offer a comparable education. This, then-Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote, made the "separate but equal" doctrine a moot point. "The basic consideration here is … what opportunities Missouri itself furnishes to white students and denies to Negroes solely upon the ground of color," he wrote.

After the historic win, though, Mr. Gaines's story quickly turned tragic. The NYT's David Stout explains that Mr. Gaines felt a great deal of unwanted pressure following the ruling.

Despite his victory, Mr. Gaines was troubled. He had told relatives and friends he was having trouble finding steady work to earn money for school (apparently one reason he went to Chicago), and he was ambivalent about being in the spotlight. … "Sometimes I wish I were just a plain, ordinary man whose name no one recognized."

Days after writing those words to his mother in a letter, Mr. Gaines went missing and no one ever determined what exactly happened to him.

In 2007, the NAACP asked the FBI to reopen the Gaines case to conclude exactly how Gaines went missing.

Gaines was recognized at this weekend's NAACP centennial convention in New York City. In 2006, he was awarded a posthumous, honorary law degree from the University of Missouri. Gaines was also named an honorary member of the state bar association that year.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 13, 2009 (boomark / email).