Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada: The 1938 Landmark Ruling

Introduction: America in 1938

The atmosphere in America in 1938, the year preceding the start of World War II, might best be described as cautious. The winds of change were blowing, with tensions between China and Japan escalating, and in Europe, Germany was becoming a powerful and threatening military force. Many Americans may have derived some measure of security from the distance between Europe and the United States; however, America, too, was experiencing profound political and social changes.

In 1938, the same year that Congress was considering drastic changes to the American Constitution — including legislation that would require a popular vote prior to a presidential declaration of war — the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its historic decision in Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337. That ruling marked the beginning of sweeping social changes in education and civil rights in America that would follow this landmark decision. The decision stands as one of the most significant historical markers in American history.

The Supreme Court as an Institution

Writing in 1957, Bernard Schwartz argued that the United States Supreme Court was all too often described in terms of the individual justices sitting on the Court at any given point in time. This, Schwartz contended, is not a full picture of the Court. He maintained that the complete sense of the Court should be understood as a government institution — "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 further contended that the institution has an effect on those appointed to it, causing them to lose themselves to the humility of its continuity and to become the sum of all that has come before them — and, as such, to become inextricably interwoven in all that should come after. This idea 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, Schwartz would no doubt contend, is what compels the Court to continue hearing and rendering decisions of such high social and moral reflection that those decisions forever stand the test of time. Such is the case in Gaines v. Canada, when, in 1938, the Court ruled in favor of a Black man from Missouri, establishing that Gaines had a right to be educated in law in the state where he would in fact practice law.

When the Supreme Court agreed to hear Gaines v. Canada, the changing pre-war atmosphere and the growing movement toward civil rights for Black Americans shaped the broader context. This, combined with what Schwartz described as each Justice's assimilation into the Americanness of the institution, perhaps steered the Justices in the direction of the case. Moreover, while Gaines was the first such case the Court agreed to hear, other similar cases had already challenged the notion of segregated education. The Justices sitting on the Court at that time must have recognized the sweeping changes underway in civil rights and foresaw the inevitability of segregation coming before them.

The Case: Gaines v. Canada

In Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938), the challenge before the Supreme Court was whether, under the Fourteenth Amendment, the state of Missouri had the right to fund a Black student's out-of-state legal education rather than admit him to its own law school. Lloyd Gaines, a Black student, had applied to and been denied admission to the University of Missouri School of Law solely on the basis of race.

At the time, no Missouri state institution offered Black students the opportunity for in-state graduate education, particularly not at the law school level. Howard University in Washington, DC, a predominantly Black university, existed at the time and offered some graduate studies, but did not have a law school in 1938.

The Court relied upon the Fourteenth Amendment, interpreting its equal protection guarantees in terms of equality of opportunity. In doing so, the Court established the precedent that would eventually help bring about an end to educational segregation in America, upholding that the Fourteenth Amendment provided Black Americans the same educational opportunities as those afforded to white Americans.

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

The likelihood that the Court was acting progressively in the direction of equality and civil rights can perhaps be inferred from the case itself. The case on behalf of Gaines, argued by NAACP lawyers, could be argued against segregation at the graduate level in a way that was not possible at lower levels, because states had set up separate schools and colleges for Black students that were deemed equivalent to those offered to white students at the undergraduate level.

While Gaines seemed the ideal case, the NAACP made a series of procedural errors, which the Supreme Court chose not to make an issue when deciding to hear the case. One point the Court overlooked was that the NAACP had not exhausted its opportunities for relief through Missouri's own legal system. Under Missouri law, Gaines had the right to request that the state open a law school at Lincoln University, the Black college he attended, which did not have one. Chief Justice Hughes circumvented this 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 Hughes had decided against an appellant in a similar case some twenty-four years earlier. Here again, one might infer that Hughes, and presumably the majority of the sitting Justices, were aware of the changes sweeping American society and the direction in which civil rights for Black Americans were moving.

Because Missouri subsequently created a law school in St. Louis — one that, after review by experts, was deemed capable of providing an education equivalent to that received by white law students — the case was remanded to the lower court to determine whether Gaines could in fact receive an equivalent education at the newly established Lincoln law school. The case was ultimately dismissed in the lower court when, after more than a year, the NAACP had to reluctantly admit that it could not produce Gaines in person at the request of the state's attorneys. Nevertheless, because Gaines had gone before the Supreme Court and the Court had found in Gaines's favor, the case marked a turning point and a victory in civil rights history, even after its subsequent dismissal.