Gaining Ground

Missouri has featured prominently in the story of American race relations since well before recent events in Ferguson and at the University of Missouri. Due at least partly to the state’s precarious position on the border between slavery and freedom–and then segregation and integration–white and black Missourians have been fighting notable public legal battles over racial justice throughout the state’s history. Most famously, the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sanford began in Missouri before making its way to the Supreme Court and resulting in the denial of black citizenship throughout the country. Almost a century later, another landmark case that began in Missouri made its way to the highest federal court and ultimately led to quite a different result.

In 1938 the Supreme Court offered a ruling in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada that sounded the death knell for segregated education. This case was “a disappointment in its day for failed potential,” but it has since been reconsidered. University of Missouri at Columbia professors James W. Endersby and William T. Horner want readers to appreciate the case “as the foundation on which a house of desegregated education was built.” They argue successfully that Gaines v. Canada laid the groundwork for the much more famous case of Brown v. The Board of Education in 1954.

The first case in which the Supreme Court ruled on race and equal opportunity in higher education, Gaines v. Canada resulted in the court applying the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent states from using race to deny equal educational opportunities to black Americans. Described by the authors as “a major turning point for constitutional interpretation of equal protection,” the case “countered the dominant judicial doctrine that states had the right to determine racial relations.” Though it ultimately failed in the goal of overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine introduced in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, it set the federal court on a path that would eventually lead it to declare that separate was inherently unequal in Brown.

Endersby and Horner describe the complex mix of legal, sociopolitical, and personal factors behind the case to offer new insights that include an in-depth analysis of the often-overlooked importance of local black attorneys and NAACP leaders, the crucial role of the black press, and the personal circumstances of the people behind the headlines.

Gaines v. Canada was Charles Hamilton Houston’s first Supreme Court case, and it was the first time the nation’s top court confronted racial segregation in education. Houston, who would later become famous for his legal work with the NAACP, had just left a position as dean of Howard University Law School to help the civil rights organization build a strong legal platform. Not yet ready to take on the Deep South states, he and his team focused on border states like Maryland and Missouri, where they believed local blacks could more freely support NAACP efforts with less risk to their physical and economic well-being. Even so, this case taught Houston and the NAACP how stressful civil rights litigation could be for the plaintiff, as they ultimately had to deal with the still-unexplained disappearance of Gaines. Gaines v. Canada also brought future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall into the spotlight of the NAACP’s legal efforts.

While respectful of the role of famous lawyers like Houston and Marshall, the authors make sure to illustrate the importance of local attorneys and NAACP leaders. Indeed, the national office had to rely heavily on local attorneys but, fortunately, St. Louis contained not only a thriving local NAACP branch but also a “cadre of professional black lawyers willing to invest their efforts to produce constitutional change.” Of these, the two who figured most prominently were Sidney Redmond and Henry Espy, both of whom provided their services pro bono.

This team of national and local attorneys knew that they could not confront segregation head-on...