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Lloyd L. Gaines '35
1911 - March 19, 1939
Lloyd Lionel Gaines, born in 1911 in Water Valley, Mississippi, became a central figure in the early 20th-century U.S. civil rights movement as the plaintiff in Gaines v. Canada (1938). After he graduated from Lincoln University with honors in 1935, he applied to law school at the University of Missouri. Denied admission to the University of Missouri School of Law due to his race, he was offered scholarship money to go to school out-of-state. Gaines refused the scholarship and, with the assistance of the NAACP, sued Missouri.
Gaines's subsequent lawsuit reached the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in a landmark decision that compelled Missouri to either admit him or establish a separate, equal law school for black students. Following this victory, the creation of the Lincoln University School of Law marked progress. However, Gaines mysteriously disappeared in Chicago in 1939, leaving his fate unknown. Gaines intended to take the University of Missouri back to court but disappeared before the trial started. In 2007, the FBI reopened the case as part of an initiative to investigate missing persons cold cases related to the civil rights era.
Notable Achievements
- The Lloyd Gaines case was the first stepping stone from the "separate but equal" policy to the landmark Brown v Board of Education case.
- The University of Missouri School of Law and the state honored Gaines by naming the Black Culture Center at the University of Missouri and a scholarship at its law school after him and another initially denied black student.
- In 2006, Lloyd Gaines was posthumously granted an honorary law degree.
- The state bar awarded him a posthumous law license.
- A portrait of Gaines hangs in the University of Missouri Law School building.
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