Beginning in 1936, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund decided to take over the case of Lloyd Gaines, a graduate student from Lincoln University (an all-black college) who applied to the University of Missouri Law School but was rejected because of his race. The state of Missouri gave Gaines the choice of attending an all-black law school he would build (Missouri didn`t have all-black law schools at the time) or let Missouri help pay him to attend a law school in a neighboring state. Gaines rejected both options and decided to sue the state to attend University of Missouri Law School by enlisting the services of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In 1938, his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and in December of that year, the court sided with him. The six-member majority stated that since there is currently no “black” law school in the state of Missouri, the “equality clause” requires the state to provide legal training to Gaines within its borders. In other words, since the state legally trained white students, it could not send black students like Gaines to school in another state. The NAACP challenged the law and won a legal victory in 1915 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Guinn v. the United States that grandfather clauses were unconstitutional. We salute the vision and courage of the legal minds who conceived, developed, and executed the “separate but equal” dismantling plan in American life.
Learn more about the people behind Brown vs. Board of Education: Leading the charges against Jim Crow was a team of talented NAACP lawyers, many of whom were from Virginia. Denied admission to segregated public law schools in Virginia, they attended Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. In 1933, Richmond native Oliver Hill finished second in his class at Howard, just behind Thurgood Marshall. Professor Charles Hamilton Houston, associate dean of the Faculty of Law, mentored Marshall and Hill. When Houston left Howard University in 1934 to become a consultant to the NAACP, he recruited Marshall and Hill to help him fight racial segregation. In 1941, Florida native Robert Carter was drafted into the Army; but racial prejudice forced him to join the LDF. After his discharge from the Army in 1944, Carter became Thurgood Marshall`s legal assistant and the following year assistant to the special counsel. Carter was the lead attorney in the desegregation case at Topeka School, one of five combined cases in Brown. In addition, Carter was one of the leading lawyers in Sweatt v. Maler and Braun, as well as in many other cases.
In 1972, President Nixon appointed him a judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. He served on this bench with great honour for almost 40 years. Board of Education is the result of the hard work and diligence of the nation`s best lawyers, including Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, Constance Baker Motley, Spottswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, Louis Redding, Charles and John Scott, Harold R. Boulware, James Nabrit and George E.C. Hayes. These DFL lawyers were assisted by a group of lawyers. According to scholar Daniel Moak, Marshall “profoundly shaped the political direction of the United States,” “altered constitutional law,” and “opened new facets of citizenship for black Americans.” [33]: 411 For Tushnet, he was “probably the most important American lawyer of the twentieth century”; [5]: 1498 according to political scientist Robert C.