James W. Endersby and William T. Horner. Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation.

Abstract

In Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation, James W. Endersby and William T. Horner chronicle the story of Missouri resident Lloyd Lionel Gaines and his arduous struggle to enter the University of Missouri School of Law, culminating in the Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada decision, the first U.S. Supreme Court triumph against segregated education achieved by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The book traces the genesis of the Gaines case and the pioneering work of Charles Hamilton Houston, the former dean of Howard University School of Law and the visionary chief architect of the NAACP’s legal program, to defeat Jim Crow. It illuminates Gaines’s role as a precursor to important legal victories by the NAACP in the fight against segregation in higher education, including Sipuel v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma, McLaurin v. Oklahoma, and Sweatt v. Painter. Building on a significant body of scholarship on the NAACP’s legal strategy to end segregation, the book centers on Lloyd Gaines’s tumultuous journey. When Gaines, a Lincoln University honor graduate, sought to enter the Missouri School of Law, the university denied him admission because of his race, instead offering him a pittance to enroll in an out-of-state law school. This practice allowed segregationist states ostensibly to comply with the Plessy v. Ferguson decision while maintaining all-white institutions and avoiding the cost of establishing black graduate and professional programs.