Missouri Ex Rel. Gaines v.

Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada

305 U.S. 337 (1938)

The atmosphere in America in 1938, the year preceding the start of World War II might be best described as cautious. The winds of change were blowing with tensions between China and Japan, and in Europe Germany was becoming a powerful and threatening military force Many Americans might have derived some measure of security in the distance between Europe and the United States, however, America, too, was experiencing political and social changes. In 1938, the same year that Congress was looking to drastically change the American Constitution with legislation that would call for a popular vote prior to a declaration of war by the president; the Supreme Court handed down its historical decision Gaines v. Canada 305 U.S. 337, marking the beginning of sweeping social changes in education and civil rights in America that were to follow this 1938 landmark decision. The decision stands as one of the most significant historical markers in American history.

The Court

Writing in 1957, Bernard Schwartz claimed that the United States Supreme Court was all too even described in terms of the individual justices sitting on the Court at the point in time that the writer wrote about it. This, Schwartz says, is not a full picture of the Court. Schwartz says that the complete sense of the Court should be one as a government institution, one which "the only continuing governmental institution in our Constitutional structure; individual Justices come and go, but their arrivals and departures scarcely affect the unbroken functioning of the Court as a judicial organ.." Schwartz contends, too, that the institution has an effect on those elected to it that causes them to lose themselves to the humility of its continuity in process, and to become the sum of all that has come before it up until that point, and as such to become inextricably interwoven in all that should come after them as individual members of the highest court in the nation. This idea that Schwartz has posited can be inferred in the tendency of the Justices, as exemplified by Justice Harlan's remarks, to juxtapose.".. The account of the human subject that one might hold as a private citizen with the account of the human subject that he felt constrained to as an officer of the law."

This, no doubt Schwartz would contend, is what compels the Court to continue to hear and to render decisions that are of such a high social and moral reflection in the substance of their decisions, that those decisions forever stand the test of time. Such is the case in the decision in Gaines v. Canada, when, in 1938, the Court ruled in favor of a black man from Missouri allowing that Gaines had a right to be educated in the law in the state where he would in fact practice law.

In 1938, when the Supreme Court agreed to hear Gaines v Canada, there was the changing pre-war atmosphere and the move towards civil rights for Americans. This, combined with what Schwartz has already described as the Justice's assimilation of the Americaness of the institution of the Supreme Court, perhaps served to steer the Justices in the direction of the case. Also, while Gaines was the first case that the Court agreed to hear, there were other similar cases that had challenged the notion of segregated education.. Certainly the Justices sitting on the Court at that time must have recognized the sweeping changes in civil rights, and foresaw the inevitability of segregation coming before the Court.

The Case

In the case of Missouri ex. Rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938),the challenge before the Supreme Court was whether or not under the Fourteenth Amendment, the state of Missouri had the right to scholarship out of the state a black student, Lloyd Gaines, to attend law school

At the time, no state offered black students the opportunity for instate graduate education, especially not to law school. Howard University, in Washington, DC, a predominantly black university, existed at the time and offered some graduate studies, but they did not, in 1938, have a law school.

The Court relied upon the Fourteenth Amendment, interpreting the equal protection guarantees of that Amendment in terms of equality in opportunity. Thus, the Court established the precedent for what would bring about an end to educational segregation in America by upholding that the Fourteenth Amendment provided black Americans the same opportunities in education as those opportunities being offered white Americans.

Thomas Hocutt, who in 1933 had sought admission to the University North Carolina's school of pharmacy, and who had, like Gaines, been denied admission to that school, but, unlike Gaines had not been offered the alternative for education; actually was the first "equalization" suit challenging segregation under the Fourteenth Amendment That case was dismissed because Hocutt's undergraduate school did not produce certain records, most notably his student transcripts. There was another, very similar to Gaines's case, in Maryland, but the state of Maryland handled the decision, which ruled in favor of a black student, Donald Murray, being granted admission to the University of Maryland Law School. However, Gaines was the first case to be heard before the Supreme Court of the United States on the matter of segregated education.

That the Court might have foreseen the move towards greater and increasing equality and civil rights for black Americans, and was therefore acting progressively in the direction of equality and civil rights on behalf of black Americans, can perhaps be inferred from the case itself. The case on behalf of Gaines, argued by NAACP lawyers, could be argued against segregation on the graduate level, where it could not have done so on lesser levels because the states had set up separate schools and colleges for black students, which were the equivalent of the studies offered to white students in other than graduate levels of education..

While Gaines seemed the ideal case, the NAACP made a series of errors, which the Supreme Court chose not to make an issue when deciding to hear the case. One point that the Court ignored, was the fact that the NAACP had not exhausted its opportunity for relief through the State of Missouri's legal system. Under Missouri law, Gaines had a right to request that the State of Missouri open a law school at the college he attended for black students, which did not have a law school. "Chief Justice Hughes circumvented the procedural problem by interpreting Missouri law to confer discretion, rather than an obligation, on the Lincoln Board of Curators to establish a separate black law school on request" This, even though Justice Hughes had decided against an Appellant in a similar case some 24 years earlier. Here, again, we might infer that Hughes, and presumably the majority of the sitting Justices, were aware of the changes sweeping American society and civil rights. It might have also demonstrated the Court's position on the direction in which civil rights for black Americans was moving

However, because Missouri University created a law school in St. Louis, and it was, after a review by experts, deemed to be a proper law school and one that could provide an equivalent education to black law students as was being received by white students, the case was remanded to the lower court to decide if in fact Gaines could accomplish the education at the newly established Lincoln law school as he could in a white law school setting.

The case was dismissed in the lower court when, after more than a year, the NAACP had to reluctantly admit that they could not produce Gaines in person at the request of the State's Attorneys. Still, because Gaines had gone before the Supreme Court, and with the Court's finding in favor of Gaines, even subsequently having been remanded back to the lower courts where it was dismissed; the case nonetheless marked a turning point and a victory in civil rights history.

The Gaines Decision and the Civil Rights Movement

In the overall civil rights picture, Gaines v Canada is a landmark decision, one which helped desegregate education in America. Once the Supreme Court's decision on Gaines was handed down, it served as the basis for the argument of academic equality

Gaines was "The NAACP's first Supreme Court victory in the coordinated attack on segregation... The case was also cited in subsequent equality and discrimination cases that were heard before the Supreme Court, and cases not related to education, but for which Gaines no less served the landmark precedent in having established the Court's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment as ensuring equality.. In the language of Justice Vinson in a later and unrelated case,.".. The difference between judicial enforcement of the restrictive covenants is the difference...between denied the rights of property available to other members of the community and being accorded full enjoyment of those rights on an equal basis." There is, again, the essence of the language that was used in the Gaines decision.

However, Justice Vinson went further, adding his historical comments to Gaines by saying that the Fourteenth Amendment rights were "personal' which meant that "it is no answer... To say that the courts may also be induced to deny white persons rights of ownership and occupancy on the grounds of race or color."

In Missouri, the state where Gaines had sought to attend law school, his case was significant in that the undergraduate college he attended, Lincoln, seized the opportunity to use the Missouri law and grant money set aside to educate black graduate students, to create a black law school in St. Louis. Less than a year after the Gaines decision had been handed down by the Supreme Court, some thirty students enrolled in the St. Louis law school that had been created for black law students as a result of the Gaines case.

In the years that followed the Gaines decision, there were successes, and losses for civil rights and for black students. In another case involving Missouri again, the school opted to close its journalism school rather than admit a black student to the school.. With the Gaines case having already established the precedent, the school made excuses about low enrollment, and closed the program to whites and blacks.