.. To say that the courts may also be induced to deny white persons rights of ownership and occupancy on the grounds of race or color."
In Missouri, the state where Gaines had sought to attend law school, his case was significant in that the undergraduate college he attended, Lincoln, seized the opportunity to use the Missouri law and grant money set aside to educate black graduate students, to create a black law school in St. Louis. Less than a year after the Gaines decision had been handed down by the Supreme Court, some thirty students enrolled in the St. Louis law school that had been created for black law students as a result of the Gaines case.
In the years that followed the Gaines decision, there were successes, and losses for civil rights and for black students. In another case involving Missouri again, the school opted to close its journalism school rather than admit a black student to the school.. With the Gaines case having already established the precedent, the school made excuses about low enrollment, and closed the program to whites and blacks.
However, in the years following Gaines, there were significant setbacks for civil rights when states, mostly southern, found ways to circumvent segregation, and created black graduate schools and law schools. Oddly enough, many of the cases that were filed and fought were done so on behalf of the appellants by a young NAACP lawyer named Thurgood Marshall; who would later become the first black Supreme Court Justice of the United States.
Lloyd Gaines
There is little actual information upon which to go when trying to determine what became of Lloyd Gaines. Unfortunately, there was much more interest in what he represented to a greater majority of the black community, and to the white community, than there was interest in Gaines' individual welfare. Was Gaines' own personal dreams and ambitions sacrificed to the greater good of the civil rights movement? Some might argue that in fact he was, since the NAACP ran with the momentum of the details of his case, but lost track of Gaines as a person and, when they perhaps needed him most, had not kept track of him, which caused the case - although not the progress - to be dismissed.
What is know, is that Gaines enrolled in the University of Michigan for year of graduate study, but then left and did not return. It has been documented that Gaines then went to Chicago, where he stayed with friends, then, disappeared to the point where not even the NAACP could locate him. What is known, is that Lloyd Gaines never succeeded in his bid to go to law school. Even if Gaines had attended the law school that was set up as a result of his request to attend law school, there is no assurance that he would have been able to be admitted to the bar. When the question was raised whether not the law school that had been created by the State of Missouri to satisfy the Gaines case was one that would be recognized and accredited by the."..Association of American Law Schools, respected accrediting organization, counsel for the University object to the question as immaterial."
History has often taken on the perspective of the individual historian, professional or lay person. It is no different in the lessons taught on Gaines. What is important is the hope that the sacrifice made by, and perhaps of, Lloyd Gaines inspired in other black Americans. To that end, Lloyd Gaines has not disappeared, but remains here, a figure in American history and a person of great social and cultural significance.
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But if Houston insisted that Plessy be enforced that is, if the NAACP sued a state to make its schools for black children equal to those for whites which Plessy did require then he could undermine segregation. (Jomills Henry Braddock. A Long-Term View of School Desegregation: Some Recent Studies of Graduates as Adults. Phi Delta Kappan. 259-61. 1984) He reasoned that states would either have to build new schools for
Brown v Board of Education is one of the most famous landmark cases in American court history. Set against the backdrop of the early 1950s, just as the civil rights movement was beginning to heat up, Brown v Board of Education changed the face of American schools in a significant way and set the stage for further more sweeping reforms in other areas, such as worker discrimination and fair labor
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