Term Paper on "Court Case Historically, Gaines v. Canada (1938)"

Term Paper 10 pages (3457 words) Sources: 10

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Court Case

Historically, Gaines v. Canada (1938) was the first case to directly challenge school segregation. The petition was filed by Lloyd Gaines for admission to the University of Missouri Law School. The verdict of the case upheld the precedent of "separate but equal" established by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The decision in the Gaines case focused on the practice of southern states to meet the provision of "equality" by awarding out-of-state tuition scholarships to black students. In lieu of providing equal facilities, blacks were expected to use the scholarships to defray costs associated with attending northern institutions. Southern states universally ignored the Court's ruling that the scholarships did not equalize the conditions.

POST-VERDICT ERA

After the decision of Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 1938, the Court began to look sternly at the issue of racial segregation, insofar as it tested for the first time the adequacy of the separate-but-equal formula in the realm of public education. Petitioner Gaines brought suit after he had been denied admission to the Law School of the University of Missouri, charging that the university's arbitrary action violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Since Missouri did not maintain a separate law school for Negroes, it had offered to pay Gaines's expenses at a law school in an adjacent state in order to provide him with advantages comparable to those available to white Missourians. (Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 1975). Chief Justice Hughes, however, was not misled by this segregation ploy and went to the heart of the issue when he sought to determine the concrete meaning of the equal-protection clause in terms of the actual facilities available to Negroes. Hughes wrote, "The fact remains that instruction in law for Negroes is not now afforded by the State, either at Lincoln University or elsewhere within the State, and that the State excludes Negroes from the advantages of the law school it has established at the University of Missouri." (Paul L. Rosen. The Supreme Court and Social Science. University of Illinois Press, 1972)

In appraising directly the separate-but-equal formula, Hughes avoided all esoteric discussion of the definition of equality. He emphasized that on the face of the record Missouri had not in the first instance provided two schools that could be compared. Therefore, Hughes concluded, if the Negro has to leave the state in order to receive a legal education, this by itself "is a denial of the equality of legal right to the enjoyment of the privilege which the State has set up, and the provision for the payment of tuition fees in another State does not remove the discrimination." (Paul L. Rosen. The Supreme Court and Social Science. University of Illinois Press, 1972)

The primary significance of Hughes's opinion was the Court's forthright examination of the condition of equality. Moreover, for the first time the Court seriously appraised the effect of the separate-but-equal formula in the field of public education. As soon as the Court posed the question of the meaning of "equal facilities in separate schools," the promise of simulative equality provided by the separate-but-equal formula was bound to be revealed as a transparent legal fiction. As Robert Harris has written, "What makes the Gaines case unusual is that the Court looked beyond the formula to question the fiction, and in law to question a fiction is to kill it." The Gaines case by no means rendered school segregation indefensible, but it did make it more vulnerable to future legal assault. Gaines himself, shortly after his admission to the University of Missouri Law School, mysteriously dropped out of sight and was not heard from again and of the means for its practical application, has long been a subject of dispute. Since there was no Negro law school in Missouri, in the Gaines case the question of equality was easily resolved. However, once the Court was called upon to decide whether two separate school systems or, indeed, separateness itself were compatible with the requirement of the equal-protection clause, then judicial interpretation would necessarily entail a sociological and psychological understanding of racial segregation. (Peter Irons, Jim Crow's Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision. New York: Viking, 2002)

EFFORT TOWARDS LEGAL TRANSFORMATION

Charles Houston initiated the initial step towards legal racial transformation. The Founders launched their battle against segregation in education with an attack on its presence in state university law schools. The purpose of the suit was to compel the University of Missouri to permit the enrolment of black applicants. It was the beginning of a fight for "identical quality and quantity of educational opportunity for all citizens regardless of race, color or creed." According to an interview of Charles Hamilton conducted by Genna Rae McNeil, the final objective, however, was not just an "equalization" of the sort contemplated by Plessy, i.e. "Equality of education is not enough. There can be no true equality under a segregated system. No segregation operates fairly on a minority group unless it is a dominant minority. The American Negro is not a dominant minority; therefore he must fight for complete elimination of segregation as his ultimate goal." (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1961)

It was seventeen years of continuous struggle that brought Brown to fruition, and prohibited Jim Crow's system of inequality. The objective was to seek better replacement. The ultimate aspiration of Brown and subsequent school desegregation litigation was for black and white children to finally sit together, learn together, and grow up together in the public schools. If it could achieve this end, these children would build the foundation for a society in which black and white Americans who, although born of different circum-stance and subjected to different legal constructs, could ultimately participate in citizenship, as well as employment, housing and society, as equals. The Court's decision in Brown and subsequent cases courageously embraced this aspiration and took a giant step toward bringing the miracle of the constitution to life.

The foundational cases and references within the context of the complaints were provided; Brown Court relied on four of these foundational cases, Gaines, 305 U.S. 337 (holding that a state that provides legal education to whites within its borders, must provide the same for blacks within its borders); Sipuel v. Bd. Of Regents of Univ. Of Oklahoma, 332 U.S. 631 (1948) (holding that a state is required to provide a legal education to black students if it does so for white students); Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950) (holding that a state has not fulfilled its Equal Protection obligation to black students by providing a separate law school); and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950) (holding that black students must be treated equally once admitted).

The graduate schools in their defense presented their thesis, in accordance to which, separate could never be equal because of the differential prestige and any number of other intangible benefits that follow from attending the "preferred" or "white" school. The Court stressed over the importance of a school's reputation and other "qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school." These qualities have a significant effect on the educational opportunities and position enjoyed by students. (Jomills Henry Braddock, James McPartland. Social-Psychological Processes That Perpetuate Racial Segregation: The Relationship Between School and Employment Desegregation, 19 J. Black Stud. 267, 283-84. 1989)

The legal arm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People further got motivated by the decision of the court, it argued successfully for the admittance of blacks to white graduate schools in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950) and Sweatt v. Painter (1950). The NAACP subsequently turned its attention to public schooling at the elementary and secondary level due to, first, resignation on the part of blacks that whites would never grant equality, and second, the intransigence of white southerners.

Negro law students are entitled to "substantially equal" educational facilities as those provided for white students in the same state. The much we established in State of Missouri et rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938), and in Pearson v. Murray, 169 Md. 478 (1936). If the state cannot provide those facilities, it must admit Negro law students to its all-white schools. (Robert J. Harris, "The Constitution, Education, and Segregation," 29 Temple Law Quarterly 409, 416 (1956))

INFLUENCE and INVOLVEMENT of NAACP

In 1930s, Charles Hamilton Houston joined the NAACP to head its legal attack on Jim Crow. As the United States Supreme Court began to make decisions favorable to black rights regarding criminal procedures, it was felt that the time was right to challenge Jim Crow in other areas. He understood that judges would not overturn previous constitutional interpretations unless absolutely necessary. If he confronted the "separate but equal" doctrine laid down in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the Court would most… READ MORE

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