Marshall decided to attack the school question on the graduate,
professional, and law-school level. First, Southerners did not
seem as frightened about racial mixing on the graduate school
level, and second, the cost of developing separate graduate and
professional schools for a handful of Negro students, it was
reasoned, would be prohibitive.
In 1938, in Gaines v. Canada, the Supreme Court declared that
Missouri's failure to admit a Negro, Lloyd Gaines, to the state
law school, when the state did not have a comparable "separate
but equal" institution for Negroes, constituted a violation of
the "equal-protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Missouri wanted to solve the problem by paying the student's
tuition in an integrated Northern law school, but the Court
refused to accept that as a solution. It argued that the state
had already created a privilege for whites which it was denying
to Negroes. This, in itself, was a Constitutional violation.
A decade passed without any further action. In 1948, the Supreme
Court attacked Oklahoma for its failure to permit a Negro to
enroll in its state law school.
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