"Damnify Both Races"

One day some three years ago, 24-year-old Lloyd L. Gaines, Negro, bearing a diploma from Missouri's Lincoln University (for Negroes), presented himself at University of Missouri, surprised its officials by proposing to enter their Law School. In its 96 years, the university had never admitted a Negro. Like all Southern States, Missouri makes Negroes and whites attend separate schools.

More forehanded, however, than most Southern States, which make no provision for Negroes' professional education, Missouri had provided scholarships in northern law schools for Negroes. Missouri officials offered Gaines such a scholarship. Gaines refused it, insisted on his right to be taught law in Missouri, like white folks. Last week, in a historic decision, the U. S. Supreme Court held that Lloyd Gaines was within his rights.

The Court found that 1) Gaines was admittedly qualified to enter University of Missouri's Law School, and 2) Missouri could not shift to another State its constitutional duty to provide equal educational opportunities for all citizens, whatever their color. Reversing Missouri's courts, the U. S. Supreme Court ordered Missouri to admit Lloyd Gaines to its State university or give him legal training at Lincoln University.

White politicians in 16 Southern States that lack Negro professional schools, expecting this burst dam to bring a flood of applications from Negroes for admittance to whites' schools, sputtered and fumed. None was more vehement, however, than Kentucky-born Justice James McReynolds, who wrote a dissenting opinion (Minnesota-born Justice Pierce Butler concurring). Stormed Justice McReynolds: "I presume Missouri may . . . break down the settled practice concerning separate schools and thereby, as indicated by experience, damnify both races."

Playing for time, Missouri waited for official word from the Court, refused to say what it would do with Lloyd Gaines, now a clerk in the Michigan civil service. Best guess was that the Legislature would start a law course at Lincoln University.

Meanwhile Walter White, secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which financed the Gaines test case, declared the decision was more sweeping than he had hoped. To Negroes it means far more than a chance to go to professional school. The South today spends only one-fourth as much for each Negro child's education as for each white child's, and in Walter White's view the court's ruling that Negroes must have equal educational opportunities means that the South must establish parity in expenditures from top to bottom of its school system. Realist White observed: "We still have a struggle ahead to get the States to obey the court's mandate."

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