That case is one where the court was feeling bound by Plessy’s doctrine that separation was permissible so long as the racist separated had equal benefits. Find that separate but equal doctrine. They wanted to address Missouri’s exclusionary practices and essentially the case found that under that doctrine, the State of Missouri had an obligation to provide for blacks an equal legal education as they provided for whites.
So the ruling was no that Missouri’s Law School was required to admit blacks. The ruling was if the state of Missouri had to provide for Lloyd Gaines equal legal educations as it provide in whites. One of the defenses was that Missouri had a policy that if there were an educational opportunity offered in the state that was not available to blacks in a black institution.
The state would pay that individual tuition to gain that education in a state that did provide opportunities for blacks. The interesting thing about the Gaines’s case is the court recognizes that legal education in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa or some of the joining state that would admit Lloyd Gaines was not equal and could not be equal to the legal education provided to Missouri’s citizen in Missouri. And so the court required that they either admit Lloyd in the M.U Law School or create a law school of equal quality for Lloyd Gaines within the state.
The outcome of that case was that instead of Missouri decided to create a law school for Lloyd Gaines, they invested some money in establishing a law school that was connected to Lincoln University which was then the Black State Institution of Higher Education. They acquire a building in St. Louis, they acquired what I understand to be substantial law library and they hired a faculty for that law school.
The sad part of thee story is that Lloyd Gaines disappeared a couple of weeks before the hearing where his lawyers Charles H. Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Sidney R. Redmond and others were going to challenge the equality of that law school that had jus been set up and argued that a separate law school set up for blacks could not be equal to the M.U Law School. That hearing was never held because the plaintiff disappeared but it’s a significant case because it’s an effort of by the court to comply with the “separate but equal” doctrine which had been established in Plessy but insist that that doctrine be applied in fact because the fact of the matter was under “separate but equal” separate was never equal.
We all know the history the black elementary and you came from 12th School, we’re always under funded second hand books etcetera. And so the idea of enforcing “separate but equal”, the approach from the Civil Rights Community was to establish that separate could not be equal.
Lots of theories but no proof of anything. He wrote a letter to his mother from, he was living in a fraternity house, Alpha house in Chicago, wrote a letter that sort of indicated that he might not be in touched with her for a while. He sort of expressed some dismay over the notoriety and the public attention views was getting you know the fact that Lloyd Gaines never wanted to go law school and wanted to be a teacher, and kind of got pulled in to this effort to his credit. But I think he got tired of it. I think it was a long struggle and he was a little bit desponded. The last that I am aware of is that he told the housekeeper at that fraternity house that he was going to buy some stamps. He left the fraternity house that evening and nobody heard from him since.
There’s also a speculation that he was kidnapped by somebody and gone a way with it. There’s a speculation that he simply went of to Mexico and to get away from it all. Nobody really knows.
Well you know the effort was to attack discriminatory policies in every aspect of American life; employment, education, voting rights, property rights, access to public institutions. This was one that was trying to deal with discrimination housing and indeed there was a practice is some of these neighborhoods that wished to remain exclusive where people would simply put in restrictive covenants in their property transfer papers. If I’m white and I sell the house to a white person and want to keep the neighborhood white, I simply put a clause in the contract that says, “You can’t sell this hose to non-white.” That’s the restrictive covenant in the land papers. And so there was an effort to challenge the ability of private citizens to put those kinds of restrictions in their papers.
There are parts of again, that effort to establish that the “separate but equal” doctrine wouldn’t work. The idea of being that if you could figure out a way to create equal but separate institutions, the cost and the burden of establishing and maintaining business institutions would be impracticable but even be yond that is a notion that they can’t be equal because a part of what those institutions is the mix of people that are in them. And if you’ve got separate and distinct institutions based on race, they’re not going to be equal. That was kind of a logic they were going to. If you’re going to have the separate but equal doctrine, we’re going to insist that they indeed are equal in every respect and when you get down to the bottom line, the question is going to be, “If you’ve got the same physical facilities, the same quality of faculty, the same per pupil expenditures, the same everything, are they now equal? Do you want to spend these kinds of resources to maintain this or will you go ahead and eliminate your racist views and simply allow everyone to go to this one quality institution?” so that was the strategy.
As African-American said since they were first allowed to read the constitution, it was an effort to hold America to the promise that was contained in those foundational documents in however you interpret them. We want to insist that you interpret them fairly for both sides.
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