Lloyd Gaines and the Fight to End Segregation

James W. Endersby,William T. Horner

• Publisher: University of Missouri
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780826273628
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Winner, 2017 Missouri Conference on History Book Award In 1936, Lloyd Gaines's application to the University of Missouri law school was denied based on his race. Gaines and the NAACP challenged the university's decision. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first in a long line of decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court regarding race, higher education, and equal opportunity. The court case drew national headlines, and the NAACP moved Gaines to Chicago after he received death threats. Before he could attend law school, he vanished.

This is the first book to focus entirely on the Gaines case and the vital role played by the NAACP and its lawyers—including Charles Houston, known as "the man who killed Jim Crow"—who advanced a concerted strategy to produce political change. Horner and Endersby also discuss the African American newspaper journalists and editors who mobilized popular support for the NAACP's strategy. This book uncovers an important step toward the broad acceptance of racial segregation as inherently unequal.

This is the inaugural volume in the series Studies in Constitutional Democracy, edited by Justin Dyer and Jeffrey Pasley of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy.

1

Lloyd Gaines and the Missouri Milieu

Lloyd Lionel Gaines aspired to be an attorney; however, as an African American of modest means in Missouri in the 1930s, he had few options to prepare him for a career in the law. Gaines had overcome educational disadvantages before. Born in 1911 and raised on a small farm near Water Valley in northern Mississippi, Lloyd was the seventh of eleven children born to Henry Richard and Callie S. Gaines.¹ His father had been a rural schoolteacher, but marriage and a family had led him to abandon teaching and devote his time to working as a tenant farmer. The farm made a profit but not enough to allow the Gaineses to buy their own productive farm. By 1915, four-year-old Lloyd had lost his father and several siblings to disease and accident. Two of his older brothers had migrated north for jobs in industry. Around March 1926, Callie moved with Lloyd and her remaining family to live with her elder son, George Gaines, a Pullman porter who had started his own family in St. Louis.

The one-room schoolhouse for African Americans in Mississippi had not provided Lloyd with a high-quality education.² At age fifteen, he started the fifth grade at St. Louis’s Waring Elementary School.³ Given a healthy learning environment, he progressed at an accelerated rate.⁴ In 1931, Gaines graduated from Vashon High School, the newer of two black high schools in St. Louis,⁵ summa cum laude in a class of fifty students. He was active in student affairs, including the local honor society, the school journal, and the debating team, and he served as vice president of his senior class. Gaines won an essay contest and a $250 scholarship for an essay entitled “U.S. Government Inspection of Meat.” For a year, he attended Stowe Teacher’s College in St. Louis, a municipal normal school to train teachers for black schools. At Stowe, he joined the Junior NAACP. In 1933, he also received a $50 Curators Scholarship to attend Lincoln University in Jefferson City. Gaines completed his undergraduate education at Lincoln, majoring in history with minors in education and English, graduating in the summer session of 1935.

Gaines had decided on a legal career “long before finishing high school.”⁶ By the time of his college graduation, he had considered a range of law school options.⁷ The University of Missouri was his first choice simply because he wanted to practice law within Missouri. However, the University of Missouri never had admitted an African American applicant for any program of study. One of Gaines’s teachers at Vashon High School, Zaid D. Lenoir, a member of the St. Louis NAACP, encouraged him and suggested that he contact the leadership of the organization. The local NAACP was looking for qualified black applicants to the state’s premier white-only public school. Gaines’s forceful argument that he wanted to attend law school at the state’s public university in order to practice law in St. Louis was just the motivation that the local and national NAACP needed. Why Gaines chose not to leave the state for a legal education elsewhere is less clear.⁸ To be sure, Gaines had no savings, and financial pressures burdened him throughout the litigation of the case. In a brief autobiography written for the NAACP, he noted cryptically, “I don’t think that I would like to practice law in a state that denies me the legal training necessary for that practice.” Yet Gaines seemed determined to pursue a career in St. Louis.

St. Louis was a vibrant, cosmopolitan city located on the Mississippi River near the mouth of the Missouri. It was more progressive than much of the rest of the state, but racial relations remained tense. Issues developing within this region became central to constitutional decision-making. It was in the St. Louis Courthouse that Dred Scott had first sued for his freedom in 1846 and 1847. The St. Louis trial court ruled in favor of Scott as it had in the cases of other slaves who had taken up residences in free territories. In 1852, however, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the trial court. The US Supreme Court went further in 1857, and Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote the majority opinion explicitly denying American citizenship to all African Americans, whether slave or free.⁹ Rather than settling the slavery question, the Dred Scott decision arguably pushed the nation to the brink of Civil War. Notably, Missouri, and especially St. Louis, continued to be a center for political disputes over issues of race in America.

Missouri was a slave state but remained with the Union during the Civil War. Racial divisions in the state and region ran deep throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet St. Louis and, to a lesser extent, Kansas City were urban areas that attracted southern blacks who migrated northward. St. Louis tended to draw blacks from Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee.¹⁰ This migration from the South, in St. Louis as in other cities, increased pressure on racial relations. Civic reforms, such as a provision for the initiative petition, were added to a new municipal charter in 1914. However, the first use of the initiative, a progressive reform to improve government, was a ballot proposition institutionalizing racial segregation in housing. In a February 29, 1916, special election, St. Louis voters adopted a segregation ordinance by a nearly 3-1 margin.¹¹ Local Republicans obtained a temporary injunction from federal Judge David P. Dyer to prevent enforcement of the ordinance, and in 1917, the US Supreme Court ruled against a similar ordinance enacted in Louisville, Kentucky, effectively voiding the St. Louis ordinance. Nevertheless, expectations of racial segregation became ingrained in white public opinion and were enforced through informal contracts, such as restrictive covenants preventing the sale of homes in white-populated areas to black buyers.¹²

Though St. Louis and the state practiced racial segregation, economic opportunities for southern refugees were good, at least compared to conditions in the Deep South and some other urban areas.¹³ Across the Mississippi River, in East St. Louis, Illinois, blacks had been victims in a vicious riot on July 2, 1917. The East St. Louis Race Riot resembled a massacre more than a political or labor protest. Estimates of deaths range between 40 and 200, nearly all of black citizens. St. Louis became “a city of asylum for those that were dispossessed and burned out in East St. Louis.” Refugees crossed the bridge into Missouri, where the community provided relief and organizations such as the NAACP offered legal services.¹⁴

Black lawyers in Missouri were admitted to the bar, though, from the beginning, the state legal community distinguished notions of political and social equality. Legal scholar J. Clay Smith Jr. noted that as early as 1871 “bitter Democrat and secessionist” attorney A. J. P. Garesche supported the admission of black lawyer John H. Johnson in 1871 for reasons of political equality while simultaneously opposing social equality.¹⁵ As a political right, blacks could practice law as well as make and enforce contracts, and by the twentieth century, they could hold judicial and elective offices, but they were obligated to live in a segregated society. St. Louis voters chose Charles Turpin as constable in 1910, the first black elected to public office in Missouri. N. A. Mitchell became the first black attorney to represent a white client in 1925.¹⁶ Nevertheless, a black citizen had difficulty obtaining justice in a criminal proceeding or a civil suit involving a white person.¹⁷ In St. Louis, blacks had political rights but not social equality. But those blacks who had migrated north had left states, such as Mississippi, where they effectively had neither political nor social rights.

Black attorneys could have difficulty in Missouri trial courts. Many had limited training and lacked the resources to pursue litigation successfully.¹⁸ Physical assaults on black lawyers were unusual, but not unheard of. In Pemiscot County, in Missouri’s Bootheel, St. Louis attorney William A. Cole was beaten by a mob of angry whites for defending four African American sharecroppers who were also threatened physically. The Missouri Supreme Court granted a writ of habeas corpus to bring the defendants to Jefferson City.¹⁹ George L. Vaughn was a prominent black attorney from St. Louis. In 1928, Vaughn narrowly escaped racial violence in Columbia, blocks away from the state university to which Gaines later would apply for admission. Vaughn requested state intervention from the governor for protection of his client being held on criminal charges, but he lost the client to a mob.²⁰

Vaughn was an active leader in the local NAACP and fought for civil rights of blacks in the courts, and he was a vocal supporter of the anti-lynching movement. In 1920, he became the first African American to run for Congress from Missouri.²¹ Two years later, Vaughn was selected as the first president of the Mound City Bar Association, the organization representing black attorneys in the St. Louis region (the St. Louis Bar Association admitted only white lawyers). Much later, Vaughn would represent the J. D. Shelley family of St. Louis in court and ultimately win the 1948 landmark US Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer, in which government enforcement of racially restrictive covenants was declared unconstitutional.²² The national NAACP office in New York assisted Vaughn with the Supreme Court case. Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston argued companion cases from Detroit and Washington, DC, concurrently.²³ Vaughn would become nationally known when, as an alternate delegate to the 1948 Democratic Convention, he forcefully demanded the unseating of the Mississippi delegation and adoption of a civil rights report.

Homer G. Phillips was an effective lawyer, an influential civic activist, and a fiery orator who pressed for civil rights. He had graduated from the Howard University School of Law. Many considered Phillips “the most outstanding black attorney in St. Louis.”²⁴ Phillips, George Vaughn, newspaper publisher Joseph E. Mitchell, and others formed the Citizens Liberty League to promote black citizens as candidates for election and party offices within the Republican Party and to lobby for black political issues.²⁵ Phillips ran for Congress in 1926 but lost in the primary (along with his former law firm partner Vaughn).²⁶ Phillips was one of the dozen founders of the National Bar Association and was elected its president in 1928. The organization provided support for black attorneys and featured civil rights as a priority issue. In his keynote address to the NBA conference in 1929, Phillips challenged black lawyers to, “like a conquering army, sweep away those prevalent faults of lethargy, ignorance and false notions about segregation, which faults are the besetting sins of our groups, and . . . service to the Negro community.”²⁷ He also lobbied persuasively for many local projects to benefit the black community, including quality public schools and a hospital to serve health care needs and training of black medical staff.²⁸ That hospital, “the largest and finest for Negroes in the world,” was completed in 1938 and named the Homer G. Phillips Hospital after the “greatest single driving force” in its creation.²⁹ The efforts of Phillips and the league also led to the construction of Vashon High School, the second black high school, but the largest, in St. Louis, from which Lloyd Gaines would graduate.

While waiting for a Delmar Loop streetcar on the morning of June 18, 1931, Homer G. Phillips was shot and killed by two individuals. Two young black men were arrested and indicted for murder almost immediately, but they were tried separately, and both were acquitted. The murder of Homer Phillips remains unsolved. As noted by editor and author Edward Clayton, most observers assume the motive for the crime was dissatisfaction over some legal action, perhaps a disputed legal fee for an estate case.³⁰

Even under conditions of segregation, black lawyers were in demand. In 1924, there were only twenty-eight practicing attorneys in St. Louis.³¹ According to figures from the 1934 U.S. Census, “[t]here are 1,230 Negro lawyers and 159,375 white lawyers. This means one Negro lawyer for every 9,667 Negroes while there is a white lawyer for each 695 of the white population.”³² Missouri beat the national average; there were 55 black lawyers in the state (one per 4,070) and 5,505 white lawyers (one per 579).³³ A white lawyer, as Charles Houston noted, “cannot be relied upon to wage an uncompromising fight for equal rights for Negroes. He has too many conflicting interests,” including profit from exploitation.³⁴ Even so, black lawyers had a difficult time attracting clientele, not only because their efforts were not respected in the white community, but also because blacks often sought out white attorneys, even paying higher fees, because they felt this tactic was the only path to justice within the legal system.³⁵ Houston dared law schools and younger African Americans to take up the fight: “The great work of the Negro lawyer in the next generation must be in the South and the law schools must send their graduates there and stand squarely behind them as they wage their fight for true equality before the law.”³⁶

Critical legal support for the case of Lloyd Gaines would come from Charles Hamilton Houston and other African American lawyers from the national NAACP office. However, a federal case would need to rise from a state court as public educational institutions were creations of the states. Houston and the national office depended on support from black lawyers and other leaders of the black community within the state. For Gaines and related litigation, Houston and his colleagues relied on a group of black lawyers in Missouri, primarily in St. Louis. The lead attorney in St. Louis, mentioned earlier, was Sidney Revels Redmond, who worked with his law partner Henry D. Espy.

Redmond was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. His father, Sidney Dillon (S. D.) Redmond, was a physician and, after health issues prevented him from continuing in that profession, an attorney. S. D. Redmond had also been a teacher (in his youth), a business entrepreneur, and a Republican Party leader. Sidney Revels Redmond’s mother, Ida, was the daughter of Hiram Revels, the first African American in the US Senate.³⁷ Redmond attended Harvard as an undergraduate then went on to Harvard Law School.³⁸ Charles Houston received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and served in the US Army in World War I before attending Harvard Law School (LL.B....