Historical Cases - Missouri v. Canada

John E. Farley: From Plassey v. Ferguson until the 1930’s the courts really didn’t pay any attention to the body equal part and what this case and some of the others start to represent is a no0tion where the court begins to say, “If you’re going to have separate facilities, you have to be able to show that they’re equal. Narrator: In 1935, Lloyd Gaines graduated with honors from Lincoln University near Jefferson City Missouri. Established as a “separate but equal” school for African-Americans, Lincoln had no law school. Gaines was denied admission to the University of Missouri Law School which was segregated. To provide for Gaines legal education, a 1929 Missouri Law Red, the Board of Curators shall have the authority to arrange for the attendance of Negro residence of the State of Missouri at the University of Any Adjacent State to take any course or to study any subjects. According to his academic at Lincoln, Gaines should have been eligible for admittance to the University of Missouri’s laws school had it not been for the color of his skin. The court would rule that Missouri’s policy of sending non white students to other schools was separate but not equal. Charles Evans Hughes: Missouri’s stresses the advantages that are afforded by the law schools of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois. When Missouri claims one design to practice law in Missouri can get a sound, comprehensive and valuable illegal education as in the University of Missouri. But the courts have study and the casebooks used in the five schools are substantially identical. We think that these matters are beside the point. The basic consideration is not as to what sort of opportunities other States provide, or whether they are as good as those in Missouri, but as to what opportunities Missouri itself furnishes to white students and denies to negroes solely upon the ground of color. In the absence of other and proper provision for his legal training within the State, Mr. Gaines is entitled to be admitted to the Law School of the State University. Narrator: On December 12, 1938, Lloyd Gaines won his case at the Supreme Court and was admitted to the University Of Missouri School Of Law to begin classes in the fall of 1939. He never did. In the spring of 1939, Gaines disappeared in Chicago, never to be seen again. Michael Middleton: That case is one where the court was feeling bound by Plessy’s doctrine that’s 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 black an equal legal education as they provided for whites. John E. Farley: You really had for the first time the courts beginning to question whether it was possible to have “separate but equal” or at least whether separate ever was equal. So I think that sort of the first sign of change in Plessy v. Ferguson type of thinking. Roger L. Goldman: Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada involved “separate but equal” not in the high schools as Brown but in the graduate and professional school and although those cases did not get rid of Plessy, they prepared the way and the reason they’re important is they prepared the way for the court to ultimately throw out Plessy v. Ferguson, in kind of bite size manageable chunks, a third good martial later or a just as a supreme court was the person who thought of this strategy. How can we get the court ultimately to overturn Plessy and desegregate the schools? And his view was, “We’ll take the most sympathetic cases” which involves separating blacks and whites in college and professional schools which made absolutely no sense. So I think those were precursors to the court’s ultimate decision in Brown. John E. Farley: The end result of those cases was they did order the black students be admitted in to the public universities and less states were able to provide an institution of comparable quality which they couldn’t do so in fact, it did result in black and white students going together, but what it didn’t do is say the whole concept of “separate but equal” is illegal. But I think it had a very important effect on the Civil Rights Movement which was basically sent all the signal that if you question the segregation or if you file lawsuits challenging it, the court’s are now going to pay attention which really wasn’t the case before Missouri ex rel. Gaines and similar cases in the 1930’s.