Education: White Missouri

A prime grievance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the fact that all but one of the 17 Southern States exclude Negroes from their Universities. Year ago, as a test case, NAACP brought crusty University of Maryland into Maryland’s Court of Appeals, succeeded in breaking its 128-year-old bar against Negroes. Last fortnight NAACP and Negro Lloyd Gaines marched into Circuit Court at Columbia, Mo. to see whether University of Missouri, lily-white since its opening in 1841, could be likewise forced across the color line.

Gangling Mississippi-born Lloyd Gaines, 24, has lived in Missouri ten years, graduated last year with honors from the State’s Lincoln University (for Negroes). When he applied for entrance to Missouri’s law school, the University Registrar tactfully suggested that Lincoln could give him a “scholarship” to study law elsewhere. Negro Gaines declined to be sidetracked, got NAACP to bring suit for a writ of mandamus compelling Missouri to admit him. Thereupon the University threw out his application, ruled that, although Lincoln was a State college, its academic credits were not acceptable at the State University.

In court the University’s attorney rehearsed both arguments, stoutly added that the State had discharged its Constitutional obligation to Negroes by chartering Lincoln as a “University” in 1921. If Negroes wanted to study law, said they, Lincoln should teach it. NAACP attorneys demanded to know how the State of Missouri could blow hot by claiming that its black and white colleges were equal, blow cold by allowing its University to reject Lincoln credits. That Lincoln was itself a “University” they denied, recalling that the $500,000 granted it to set up graduate schools had been thrown out as unconstitutional by Missouri’s Supreme Court.

After an acrid hearing Circuit Judge Walter Morris Dinwiddie took the case under advisement. Last week he turned down NAACP’s argument, flatly refused to issue an order compelling the University of Missouri to admit Blackamoor Gaines. Granted an appeal to Missouri’s Supreme Court, NAACP Attorney Sidney Redmond barked: “We’re all set for a long, hard fight.”