Charles Hamilton Houston: Petition in Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

In 1938 Houston challenged Missouri's segregation system in the U.S. Supreme Court in Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada. The document was Houston's petition for a writ of certiorari, a legal phrase that refers to a litigant's petition to a court to agree to hear the case; the court “grants cert” when it agrees to hear the case and places it on the court's docket. The Latin phrase ex rel is an abbreviation of ex relatione, meaning “upon being related.” This term refers to any legal action undertaken by the government (for example, a state government) on behalf of a private person who needs that government to enforce his or her rights (in contrast to a case in which the litigant is suing for monetary damages). In this case, the litigant was Lloyd L. Gaines, who was denied admission to the University of Missouri law school because he was an African American. “Canada” was S. W. Canada, the university registrar who officially denied Gaines entrance (though Canada later said that he was forced to do so by administration officials).

At the time, Missouri excluded African American students from the University of Missouri's law school. In common with other states, Missouri provided instead a modest scholarship so that such students could attend school in another state. Houston used the precedent of a recent case in Maryland to get the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. Typically the Supreme Court hears only a fraction of the cases that are appealed to it. It usually accepts only cases that present significant constitutional issues, and it is more likely to grant certiorari if the petitioner can show conflicting decisions on the same matter in lower courts of appeal. In the case at hand the conflict was between the Maryland Court of Appeals and the Missouri Supreme Court.

In his petition, Houston points out the inequity of making some students attend school outside the state. He bases his argument primarily on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The key portion of this amendment is Section 1:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The kernel of Houston's argument is that in failing to provide black students with graduate education substantially equal to that provided to white students, the state was failing to extend “equal protection” to black students.

In tracing the history of the case before its arrival at the Supreme Court, Houston notes that the lower courts had “denied mandamus,” a legal term that literally means “we command.” By a writ of mandamus a court orders a public official to perform a duty. Houston also refers to the Lincoln University Act of 1921. Lincoln University was founded as a vocational school for freed slaves after the Civil War. It became a land-grant college under the Morrill Act of 1890, and in 1921 it was designated a university. As a historically black institution, it provided educational opportunities for African Americans in Missouri. In the legal wrangling associated with Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada, officials argued that Gaines could obtain a legal education at Lincoln or through Lincoln in another state. Houston argues that this course of action would not provide Gaines with a “substantial equivalent” to the legal education he could receive at the University of Missouri law school. It should be noted that although Lincoln had no law school in 1938, the state hurriedly set up one that opened in 1939.

Houston's petition concludes with a simple, yet powerful statement of the magnitude of the problem: Nearly ten million African Americans lived in the sixteen states that excluded them from their state universities, and the nearly two million African American students in those states needed access to those universities. Therefore, Houston argues, “It is of the utmost public importance that a standard of equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States be established for these students as they attempt to equip themselves to meet the highest standards of citizenship.”

The Supreme Court ruled in Gaines's favor, but Gaines never attended the University of Missouri. On March 19, 1939, he disappeared from a rooming house in Chicago and was never heard from again. Some have speculated that he met with foul play, perhaps at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan; others suggested that he was tired of being in the public eye and wanted to disappear. In any event, in 2001 the University of Missouri renamed its Black Culture Center in his honor, and in 2006 Gaines was granted a posthumous honorary law degree and membership in the state bar association.