Lloyd L. Gaines

Born in 1911 in Water Valley, Mississippi, Gaines moved with his mother, Callie Gaines, and siblings to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1926 after the death of their father, Henry Gaines. 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, one of the two historically all-black high schools in the area. Gaines was placed in the fifth grade at fifteen years old because of his education in Mississippi. He caught up quickly, completing four years of grammar school in only two years and four years of high school in only three. While Gaines supported his family with an after-school job, he graduated first in his class. in an essay contest, Gaines went to college. He attended Stowe Teachers College in St. Louis for one year before transferring. ==Law school application==

Following his 1935 graduation, during the Great Depression, Gaines unsuccessfully sought work as a teacher. Around that time, NAACP lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston was looking for a plaintiff to bring a case challenging Missouri's Jim Crow laws that restricted the University of Missouri to white students. He sent St. Louis lawyer Sidney Revels Redmond, one of three dozen African Americans then admitted to the Missouri bar, to visit the university's Columbia campus, with instructions to take pictures of buildings that housed departments and courses of study not available at Lincoln University, and obtain admission forms. 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. At first Canada did not realize that Gaines was black, since the application form did not ask for prospective students to indicate their race. Only when he received Gaines' transcript from Lincoln University did he understand. He left Gaines's application on his desk, without taking any action, although the young man was otherwise qualified for admission to the law school. Canada sent Gaines a telegram urging him to meet with the registrar to discuss "further advice" and "possible arrangement". Gaines wrote both the president of Lincoln to ask what this meant, and to Frederick Middlebush, president of University of Missouri, requesting admission to the law school. Middlebush never replied. ==Lawsuit==

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. 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. Trial , where Gaines's case was tried|alt=A light-colored three-story stone building with an American flag flying from a pole in front above another red-, white- and blue-striped flag. The building has a pedimented front pavilion with four columns and a small dome at the top from which another American flag is being flown. 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. They were joined by a hundred current University of Missouri law students, reporters, and a few local African Americans. Two recent local lynchings had discouraged most of the local black community from attending, although local NAACP chapters tried to encourage attendance. African Americans sat among the whites, since the courtroom facilities were not segregated. The lawyers for both sides shared a table, and shook hands before the case. Hogsett concluded by asking Gaines if he was aware that black students were not accepted at Missouri's law school when he applied; Gaines said he had not been. In his opinion for a unanimous court, Justice William Francis Frank conceded that the state's constitution's provision requiring that its public schools be racially segregated did not explicitly extend to higher education. But that did not mean the legislature was barred from making such a prohibition. Despite language in one statute, which Gaines had relied on, saying that the university was open to "all youths" of the state, the legislature had gone to great lengths to create Lincoln and differentiate between white and black colleges. Citing both Plessy and his own court's prior holdings, Frank reiterated that this segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment: "The right of a state to separate the races for the purpose of education is no longer an open question." He also rejected a due process argument, that Gaines had been unconstitutionally deprived of his proprietary interest in the university as a citizen and taxpayer of Missouri. "[E]quality and not identity of school advantages is what the law guarantees to every citizen, white or black." Frank addressed the only remaining question, whether, as Gaines alleged, his legal education out of state would have been the equal of that he could have received at Missouri's law school. He accepted the law school's evidence about its non-specialization in the state's law and similarities in its curriculum to the neighboring state's law schools. As for the distance involved, some of those schools, such as Illinois's, were closer to St. Louis than Columbia would be for residents of Caruthersville, in the state's southeastern Bootheel. And if Gaines were to attend school outside the state, the state would subsidize his living expenses while he did, costs he would have to bear himself if he went to Missouri. Lastly, Frank distinguished Gaines's case from Murray by noting that that state's Court of Appeals had found that Maryland had made no provisions for establishing a law school for black students and did not financially support those who attended law school out of state, unlike Missouri. He believed that the construction of a law school for blacks at Lincoln would satisfy Gaines's desires if he could wait. U.S. Supreme Court 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. There he reunited with the Page family, friends and neighbors from his youth in the Central West End. He stayed at a local YMCA. ==Disappearance==

Over the next several weeks, Gaines looked for work and visited with the Pages. While he maintained at public appearances that he was determined to continue his court case until its end and to attend the University of Missouri School of Law, in private he was becoming increasingly ambivalent. His mother later said that he had decided not to go, as they both believed it was "too dangerous." Nancy Page later recalled asking Gaines directly about this. "His answer wasn't straightforward, and if I remember correctly, he said something like this: 'If I don't go, I will have at least made it possible for some other boy or girl to go.'" In his last letter to his mother, dated March 3, Gaines wrote: Gaines had begun his letter by telling his mother that he had gone to Chicago "hoping to find it possible to make my own way." He ended with "Should I forget to write for a time, don't worry about it. I can look after myself OK." Gaines also wrote that his accommodations at the YMCA were paid through March 7, and that if he stayed in Chicago beyond that date, he would have to make "other arrangements". After that, brothers at an Alpha Phi Alpha house took him in. He continued to have dinner at the Pages' home. Nancy Page said that Gaines had told her he had taken a job at a department store. A reporter later found that although he had been hired, Gaines never reported for what would have been his first day of work. In the last days that she had contact with Gaines, Page said he seemed "to be running away from something". Gaines's family members and descendants believe he—and possibly the family as a whole—had received death threats. Given their background in rural Mississippi, where they knew of lynchings, they would have been too fearful to report such threats to the police. Gaines's financial woes continued. The Alpha Phi Alpha brothers took up a collection for him. Gaines promised the Pages that he would repay their generosity by taking them out to dinner on the night of March 19 but he never got the chance to do so. Earlier that evening, Gaines told the house attendant at Alpha Phi Alpha that he was going out to buy stamps, although the weather was cold and wet. Gaines never returned, and no one ever reported seeing him again. ==Aftermath==

Gaines had left a duffel bag filled with clothing at the fraternity house when he disappeared. Since he had had a history of leaving for days at a time with little or no notice to his friends and family, and often kept to himself, his absence seemed unremarkable at first. No one reported him missing to the police in either Chicago or St. Louis. Thirty students had been admitted to the first year and they arrived for classes, but Gaines was not among them. Since only Gaines had been denied admission to the University of Missouri School of Law, only he had standing to pursue the case before the Supreme Court of Missouri. The case could not proceed without him. Lavergne notes that Houston, Marshall, and Redmond never publicly called for an investigation of Gaines's disappearance or said that they believed he had met with foul play. Since extrajudicial abductions and murders of African Americans who challenged segregation were not unheard of at the time, and the three lawyers frequently spoke out and demanded investigations when they believed such events had occurred, he thinks that they had no such evidence in Gaines' case. He suggests that they believed that Gaines, whom they knew had grown resentful of the NAACP and his role in the lawsuit, had purposely dropped out of sight. 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. ==Investigations==

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. Ebony 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. Clayton found little new information. He drew a fuller portrait of Gaines that revealed the young man's disillusionment with his activist path. Callie Gaines, bedridden in her attic, shared her last conversation with her son. She said that both of them realized that he would not be following through and enrolling in the University of Missouri School of Law. She said that he had sent her a final postcard saying, "Goodbye. If you don't hear from me anymore you know I'll be all right." She had heard all the rumors about him turning up in Mexico or New York. "But nobody knows any more than we do." One of his sisters believed he was still alive. The family has never sought to have him declared legally dead. Gaines's brother George, who had continued to loan his brother spending money at that time, said that when he disappeared, Gaines had owed him $500. He expressed bitterness that the NAACP had, in his opinion, exploited his brother. "That organization—the N-A-A-C-P or whatever it was—had him going around here making speeches," George Gaines told Clayton, "but when he got ready to go to Kansas City, I had to let him have $10 so he could get himself a white shirt." Sidney Redmond agreed that the Gaines family "doesn't seem too much concerned—and never was as I recall" about finding him, due to their resentment of the NAACP's role in pushing Lloyd Gaines into the public eye without adequately providing for or protecting him. George provided Clayton with Lloyd's letters home, including the last one, written almost two weeks before he disappeared, in which he had lamented what he felt was a lack of support from fellow African Americans and said he wished he were just a regular, unknown person again. Like the postcard, it concludes by implying that he might be out of touch for a while. In Chicago, Clayton talked to the Alpha Phi Alpha brothers among whom Gaines had spent his last known days and the Pages, his family friends from St. Louis. The former could offer little beyond clarifying the precise date of his disappearance and the duffel bag of dirty laundry he had left behind. Two who claimed Gaines had sent them postcards from Mexico were unable to corroborate their accounts by producing the postcards. 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. The Riverfront Times 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. 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. 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. 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." Garrison reported that Greene's son, Lorenzo Thomas Greene, said his father also told him of the encounter; the older man always hoped Gaines would return. But because of his experience with the FBI while active in the civil-rights movement during those years, Greene did not report his telephone contact with Gaines. "There wasn't a lot of trust there," said the son. "Even if my father went to them with that information, I really don't think they would have cared." Some of Gaines's relatives were willing to accept that he lived out his life in Mexico, as opposed to the alternative scenarios. "It's better than being buried in a basement somewhere—Jimmy Hoffa style," said Paulette Mosby-Smith, one of Gaines's great-nieces. Others believe that would have been against his nature. "It's hard for me to believe that he went to Mexico and accepted a big payoff," George Gaines told Garrison. "That's not the same man who presented himself during the trial. I don't believe he would compromise his integrity like that." Another great-niece, Tracy Berry, who graduated from law school and became a federal prosecutor, agrees: She has since told The New York Times that she believes her great-uncle was murdered. ==Legacy and honors==

Although the family never had Lloyd Gaines declared legally dead, they erected a monument to him in 1999 in a Missouri cemetery. Thurgood Marshall later said, "I remember the Gaines case as one of our greatest legal victories." He had argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court and was later that body's first African-American justice. He went on, "But I have never lost the pain of having so many people spend so much time and money on him, just to have him disappear." 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. 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. 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." 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. 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. ==See also==