Gaines v. Canada: The First Step in the Journey to Segregation's End

Gaines ex rel. Missouri v. Canada (1936) was the first case regarding race, education, and equal opportunity decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision was arguably the most significant decision on this important issue until Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Gaines case was an important step along the long path toward the doctrine that racial segregation is inherently unequal. The paper reviews the legal strategy developed by the NAACP to combat racial segregation and to guarantee equal opportunity. This strategy, implemented by Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, and other members of the NAACP legal staff, is analyzed from its origins through the initial stages of the Gaines case, as the Supreme Court began to turn away from the “separate but equal” doctrine and the end of legally sanctioned racial segregation became inevitable. The NAACP began its fight for equality in higher education – specifically in graduate and professional education – with the case of Thomas Hocutt, a resident of Durham, North Carolina, who sued for admission to the University of North Carolina’s College of Pharmacy. At the direction of Charles Hamilton Houston, the head of the NAACP’s legal team, the 2 organization’s lead attorney in the case was William Hastie.3 Hastie was Charles Houston’s cousin and, like Houston, Hastie attended Harvard Law School and, also like Houston, was later the Dean of the Howard University law school. Later, in 1949, Hastie would be appointed as the first black federal judge by President Harry Truman, and he served in the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals from 1949 to 1971.4 Thomas Hocutt lost his case at trial and the NAACP was forced to drop the case for appellate action when James Shepard, the president of the black college Hocutt attended for his bachelor’s degree, the North Carolina College for Negroes, refused to release Hocutt’s college transcript, which was required for admission to the graduate program at the University of North Carolina.5 Since much of the NAACP’s strategy was based on finding students were eminently qualified for the programs for which the applied – save for their ethnic background – denial of access to documents that would prove Hocutt’s suitability for the pharmacy school did tremendous damage to the case. However, the Hocutt case is noteworthy for its groundbreaking nature. It was not long before the NAACP was pursuing similar cases aimed at opening the gates of the highest level of education in the United States. This paper presents an examination of the roots of the NAACP’s strategy in attacking segregated education, as articulated by attorney Nathan Margold, and the reasons why it chose, under the leadership of Charles Houston, to begin with graduate and professional education. The paper introduces the NAACP’s pursuit of what would become the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision of Gaines v. Canada.

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