Lloyd l gaines biography

Plaintiff in 1930s U.S. civil rights case who disappeared

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.

Lloyd l gaines biography wikipedia

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.

The Missouri General Assembly chose the latter option.

It authorized conversion of a former cosmetology school in St. Louis to establish the Lincoln University School of Law, to which other, mostly black, students were admitted. The National Association for the Adva