For Missing Civil Rights Hero, A Degree at Last
In a final salute, University of Missouri School of Law honors first Black applicant
By Christina Asquith
If Lloyd Gaines is alive, his law degree is waiting for him. The University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law has decided to award an honorary degree to Gaines 68 years after the university denied him admission because of his race. It is sad, but few expect Gaines to show up at the May 13th graduation. He disappeared mysteriously in 1938 and hasn’t been seen since.
“What happened to him is one of the great unsolved mysteries,” says law school dean Lawrence Dessem. “It’s somewhat extraordinary to give this to an individual who we presume is no longer around.”
A former high school valedictorian, Gaines was only 24 years old when he was last seen in Chicago in 1938. Months earlier, he had been the victorious plaintiff in the landmark civil rights case, Gaines v. Canada, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Gaines’ right to equal protection under the law was violated when the University of Missouri School of Law rejected his application because he was Black.
The Gaines victory was the first Supreme Court test of the “separate but equal” clause and helped open the door to the historic Brown v. Board of Education case 17 years later. But the personal victory for Gaines was short-lived. The court case drew national headlines, and the NAACP moved Gaines to Chicago after he received death threats. But before he could attend law school, he vanished.
“We know that he would have been an outstanding attorney because he had the courage to fight this unjust decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Tim Heinsz, former Missouri law school dean, at a 1995 dedication ceremony in which a $100,000 scholarship for minority law students was announced in Gaines’ name. “Although ‘separate but equal’ remained the law, the decision that Lloyd Gaines won was one of the first successful assaults, which would lead to the eventual destruction of this noxious doctrine.”
