Lloyd L. Gaines

In 2007 The Riverfront Times, St Louis's alternative weekly newspaper, revisited the case, well over 60 years after Gaines's disappearance. By that time Gaines had received posthumous honors. The FBI had accepted the case as the oldest of nearly a hundred civil-rights era disappearances referred to it for investigation by the NAACP. His immediate family and all others who had worked or socialized with him during that time had died. Reporter Chad Garrison spoke with George Gaines, a nephew of Lloyd's, and other, younger descendants. George was one of two surviving family members who had been alive when Lloyd disappeared, although he had only been an infant.

His unknown fate notwithstanding, Gaines has been honored by the University of Missouri School of Law and the state. The Black Culture Center at the University of Missouri and a scholarship at its law school are named for him and another black student initially denied admission. In 2006 Gaines was posthumously granted an honorary law degree. The state bar granted him a posthumous law license. A portrait of Gaines hangs in the University of Missouri law school building.

In 2006 the law school posthumously awarded Gaines an honorary degree in law. The Supreme Court of Missouri, which had denied Gaines's admission almost 70 years before, and the state bar association, granted him an honorary posthumous law license. If Gaines were still alive and had reappeared (he would have turned 95 in 2006), he might have used those awards to practice law in Missouri.

In the years after Brown, when desegregation became a reality but tensions persisted and implementation proved difficult, Gaines's story became a cautionary tale at the University of Missouri. In a 2004 paper, LeeAnn Whites, a professor of Civil War history at the school, repeated a version in which Gaines had been on his way to enroll at the school as an undergraduate and had disappeared from a train traveling across the state, with the implication that he was murdered. Gerald M. Boyd, a St. Louis native and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, who was one of a few hundred black students at the University of Missouri in the early 1970s, recalls hearing Gaines's story early in his time there. He was also confronted by open displays of racial prejudice, such as the university's "Confederate Rock." "Whatever his fate," Boyd wrote in his memoirs, "in the eyes of blacks, the university bore the brunt of the blame."

Although the family never had Lloyd Gaines declared legally dead, they erected a monument to him in 1999 in a Missouri cemetery. "His legacy didn't so much make me want to go to law school," says Tracy Berry. "But I think he did instill the legacy of education in our family. It's expected that you go to college. He started the fight that made it all possible."

The University of Missouri, and particularly the University of Missouri School of Law, began recognizing Gaines near the end of the 20th century, despite his never having been admitted. It established a scholarship in his name in 1995. In 2001, the school's African-American center was named for Gaines and another African American who had legally challenged the school's color bar early in the 20th century. A portrait of Gaines hangs in a prominent public place in the law school building.

Greene, who died in 1988, claimed to have spoken on the telephone several times with Gaines, whose voice he recognized instantly. The two made plans to have dinner together, but Gaines did not show up. Greene told Reedy that Gaines had indeed "grown tired of the fight ... He had some business in Mexico City and apparently did well financially."

While Garrison did not find any new facts about the disappearance itself or Gaines's time in Chicago, he found more direct evidence that Gaines might have fled to Mexico and lived out his life there. Sid Reedy, a University City librarian who had been an Alpha Phi Alpha brother at Lincoln University, told Garrison that he became fascinated by the case in the late 1970s. Reedy had sought out Lorenzo Greene, Gaines's mentor at Lincoln University and an esteemed civil rights activist and intellectual. Greene told Reedy that while on a visit to Mexico City in the late 1940s, he had made contact with Lloyd Gaines.

The case articulated an important rule of law in the sequence of NAACP cases leading to the eventual order for desegregation of public schools: that any academic program that a state provided to whites had to have an equivalent available to blacks. The Gaines holding helped the NAACP lay the foundation for the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, holding that separate facilities for public schools were inherently unequal and ordering such schools to be desegregated, thus overturning Plessy.

Ebony reporter Edward T. Clayton revisited Gaines and his disappearance in 1951; the Times described his article as the most thorough investigation of the case. Clayton retraced Gaines's movements in the months between the Supreme Court ruling and his trip to Chicago. Many persons who knew Gaines were still alive, such as family members in St. Louis and fraternity brothers in Chicago, and Clayton interviewed them.

Houston was ill with the tuberculosis that would end his life a decade later. He resigned from the NAACP to return to private practice; Thurgood Marshall took over for him. In the first five years after the war, the NAACP found more plaintiffs and challenged segregationist policies in public graduate schools with cases such as Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla., Sweatt v. Painter, and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents. The University of Missouri School of Law, bowing to pressure from the student body, finally admitted its first African-American student in 1951. Three years later the desegregation effort climaxed with Brown, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and the separate but equal doctrine.

In the short term, the abrupt dismissal of the case forced by Gaines's disappearance was a setback for efforts to legally challenge segregation. After having spent $25,000 ($484,000 in current dollars) on the case, the NAACP had no money left. It could not support new plaintiffs, who were already difficult to find in the depressed economy. By the mid-1950s, the state closed Lincoln University School of Law, the only tangible result of the case, due to lack of students.

In January 1940, the state of Missouri moved to dismiss the case due to the absence of the plaintiff. Houston and Redmond did not oppose the motion, and it was granted.

No law enforcement agency of the era formally investigated Gaines's disappearance; it had not been reported to any, and many African Americans distrusted the police. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who was more concerned about potential communist influence on the civil rights movement, wrote in an internal memo in 1940 that he did not believe the case fell under the FBI's jurisdiction.

With the onset of World War II, other concerns displaced the Gaines case for most of the 1940s. Later the FBI released a 1970 letter from Hoover to an unidentified member of the public, thanking them for their interest in the case but reiterating his position from 30 years earlier that he did not believe the FBI had any jurisdiction to investigate. Two media outlets looked into the case, a half-century apart: Ebony magazine, in the 1950s, and The Riverfront Times of St. Louis, in the 2000s.

George Gaines said his family rarely spoke of Lloyd during his childhood in the 1940s, but when they did it was usually in positive terms. "Lloyd was always held in high regard as a person who set a positive example and stood up for what was right", he recalled. He had assumed that his uncle had died. He did not learn until reading the Ebony article that his uncle's fate was unknown.

Lloyd Lionel Gaines (born 1911 – disappeared March 19, 1939) was the plaintiff in Gaines v. Canada (1938), one of the most important early court cases in the 20th-century U.S. civil rights movement. After being denied admission to the University of Missouri School of Law because he was African American, and refusing the university's offer to pay for him to attend a neighboring state's law school that had no racial restriction, Gaines filed suit. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in his favor, holding that the separate but equal doctrine required that Missouri either admit him or set up a separate law school for black students.

Gaines's disappearance was not noted immediately, since he frequently traveled independently and alone, without telling anyone his plans. Only in late 1939, when the NAACP's lawyers were unable to locate him to take depositions for a rehearing in state court, did a serious search begin. It failed, and the suit was dismissed. While most of his family believed at the time that he had been killed in retaliation for his legal victory, there has been speculation that Gaines had tired of his role in the movement and gone elsewhere, either New York or Mexico City, to start a new life. In 2007 the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agreed to look into the case, among many other missing persons cold cases related to the civil rights era.

Near the end of 1939, the NAACP began a frantic effort to find Gaines. There were rumors that he had been killed or committed suicide, or that he had been paid to disappear and was living in Mexico City or teaching school in New York. The story received widespread media attention, and Gaines's photograph was published in newspapers across the country, with a plea for anyone with information to contact the NAACP. No credible leads were received. In his 1948 memoir, NAACP president Walter White said, "He [Gaines] has been variously reported in Mexico, apparently supplied with ample funds, and in other parts of North America."

The Pages shared the details of Gaines's increasingly anxious state of mind in March 1939. Nancy Page said she had not inquired closely, out of respect for his privacy, but could tell something was bothering him. She reported a conversation with Gaines in which he was at best ambivalent about continuing the legal case and attending the University of Missouri School of Law. Clayton learned from her that Gaines had accepted a job, and found through his own research that Gaines had never started work there.

In a December 1939 editorial, the Louisville Defender, that city's African-American newspaper, wrote:

Houston and Redmond successfully petitioned to the United States Supreme Court for certiorari. Now known as Gaines v. Canada, the case was argued in November 1938. Houston said the state's offer to pay for Gaines to attend law school out of state could not guarantee him a legal education equal to that offered white students at Missouri.

The official policy of Missouri was to pay the "out of state" expenses for education of African Americans who wished to study law until such time as demand was sufficient to build a separate law school within the state for them. At first Houston and Redmond hoped that the ruling in University of Maryland v. Murray (1936), which they had won when Maryland's Court of Appeals invalidated a similar provision there, would persuade Missouri to allow Gaines to attend without legal resistance. They began planning security arrangements for him.

They filed a writ of mandamus in January 1936 ordering that Gaines's application be considered. When Middlebush asked the university's board how it should respond, the lawyers recommended defending their policy. They adopted a resolution formally denying Gaines's admission, arguing that segregated higher education was the public policy of the state, and that Gaines had the legal option of attending law school outside Missouri at the state's expense.

Houston, Redmond and Gaines drove to Columbia, Missouri for the July 1936 trial at Boone County Courthouse. They arrived as the courthouse was beginning to open for the morning. Due to that summer's severe heat and drought, many of the white farmers from surrounding communities were there, waiting to apply for financial relief. Some went into the courtroom to take in the unusual sight, at that time, of African-American lawyers arguing a case.

Following his 1935 graduation, during the Great Depression, Gaines unsuccessfully sought work as a teacher.

In June 1935, Gaines had requested a catalog and admission form from Sy Woodson Canada, registrar, of the University of Missouri Law School. They were sent to his address at Lincoln in Jefferson City. By August he applied for admission, encouraged by Lorenzo Greene, a Lincoln University professor and veteran civil rights activist. Accounts vary as to whether Gaines did this on his own initiative or was encouraged by the NAACP, in order to have a plaintiff, without any interest in a legal career. When Redmond informed Houston that Gaines was willing to be a plaintiff, Houston initially asked for another candidate. Houston later accepted Gaines, when it became apparent he was the only available plaintiff, but never explained what his initial objections might have been.

Born in 1911 in Water Valley, Mississippi, Gaines moved with his mother and siblings to St. Louis, Missouri in 1926 after the death of their father. Part of the Great Migration from rural communities in the South to industrial cities in the North, his family settled in the city's Central West End neighborhood. Gaines did well academically, and was a valedictorian at Vashon High School.

The NAACP did not expect to overturn the "separate but equal" standard set by the US Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which allowed states to impose legal racial segregation, but to undermine it by requiring states that had segregated education to provide the "equal" part of the ruling. They targeted graduate and professional public institutions of higher learning. Unlike most other segregated facilities, these were few in number and under centralized state control. They expected that if the court ruled in their favor, segregationist states would realize they had to choose between the expense of developing duplicates of such institutions for a small group of African Americans and integrating existing facilities, and that those states would pragmatically choose the latter. Houston believed that, since such graduate schools served small portions of the population, attempts to integrate them would incite less public opposition than efforts to integrate public elementary and secondary schools. Lastly, judges had been educated in law schools and could be expected to understand the adverse effects of inequalities on students.