The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had supported Gaines's suit, planned to file another one challenging the adequacy of the new law school.

While most of his family believed at the time that he had been killed in retaliation for his legal victory, there has been speculation that Gaines had tired of his role in the movement and gone elsewhere, either New York or Mexico City, to start a new life.

[5] In June 1935, Gaines had requested a catalog and admission form from Sy Woodson Canada, registrar, of the University of Missouri Law School.

By August he applied for admission, encouraged by Lorenzo Greene, a Lincoln University professor and veteran civil rights activist.

[11] During his opening arguments, Houston reiterated that Gaines's exclusion from the law school solely on racial grounds violated his constitutional rights.

[5] Gaines conceded that some of the out-of-state law schools were closer to St. Louis than Columbia, and cost less to travel to, per evidence the state introduced, but noted that students there were not compelled to choose them.

But when Houston asked him also if he was aware of any problems caused by the admission of a black student at Maryland following that lawsuit, McDavid said he was not, as he had not researched the issue.

[5] Hogsett presented his case for the audience, some of whom nodded in sympathy with his arguments, while Houston concentrated on getting facts in the record for appeal, hopefully to the U.S. Supreme Court, the only venue where he expected and wanted to prevail.

[13] In his opinion for a unanimous court, Justice William Francis Frank conceded that the state's constitution's provision requiring that its public schools be racially segregated did not explicitly extend to higher education.

Despite language in one statute, which Gaines had relied on, saying that the university was open to "all youths" of the state, the legislature had gone to great lengths to create Lincoln and differentiate between white and black colleges.

[14] Citing both Plessy and his own court's prior holdings, Frank reiterated that this segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment: "The right of a state to separate the races for the purpose of education is no longer an open question."

He also rejected a due process argument, that Gaines had been unconstitutionally deprived of his proprietary interest in the university as a citizen and taxpayer of Missouri.

"[15] Frank addressed the only remaining question, whether, as Gaines alleged, his legal education out of state would have been the equal of that he could have received at Missouri's law school.

Heman Marion Sweatt, later the plaintiff in another desegregation case heard by the Supreme Court, worked with Gaines at the University of Michigan.

He gave speeches to local NAACP chapters and church groups while seeking donations, telling them "I am ready, willing and able to enroll in the law department at the University of Missouri in September, and I have the fullest intention of doing so," but he still had to borrow money from his brother George for everyday expenses.

While he maintained at public appearances that he was determined to continue his court case until its end and to attend the University of Missouri School of Law, in private he was becoming increasingly ambivalent.

In August, Houston and Sidney Redmond went looking for Gaines, as they had begun to argue his case at the Missouri Supreme Court's rehearing.

[6] The story received widespread media attention, and Gaines's photograph was published in newspapers across the country, with a plea for anyone with information to contact the NAACP.

In his 1948 memoir, NAACP president Walter White said, "He [Gaines] has been variously reported in Mexico, apparently supplied with ample funds, and in other parts of North America.

"[22] Lavergne notes that Houston, Marshall, and Redmond never publicly called for an investigation of Gaines's disappearance or said that they believed he had met with foul play.

Since extrajudicial abductions and murders of African Americans who challenged segregation were not unheard of at the time, and the three lawyers frequently spoke out and demanded investigations when they believed such events had occurred, he thinks that they had no such evidence in Gaines' case.

[10] Fifty years later, near the end of his own career as a Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall recalled the case in terms that suggest this assessment: "The sonofabitch just never contacted us again.

[4]: 161 No law enforcement agency of the era formally investigated Gaines's disappearance; it had not been reported to any, and many African Americans distrusted the police.

[1] George provided Clayton with Lloyd's letters home, including the last one, written almost two weeks before he disappeared, in which he had lamented what he felt was a lack of support from fellow African Americans and said he wished he were just a regular, unknown person again.

Reedy had sought out Lorenzo Greene, Gaines's mentor at Lincoln University and an esteemed civil rights activist and intellectual.

"[1] In a December 1939 editorial, the Louisville Defender, that city's African-American newspaper, wrote: "[W]hether Gaines has been bribed, intimidated or worse, should certainly have little permanent effect on the struggle for equal rights and social justice in connection with Negro education in the South ... [where] Negroes are already hammering upon the doors of graduate schools hitherto closed to them, with increasing persistence.

[10] In the short term, the abrupt dismissal of the case forced by Gaines's disappearance was a setback for efforts to legally challenge segregation.

In the first five years after the war, the NAACP found more plaintiffs and challenged segregationist policies in public graduate schools with cases such as Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ.

[23] In the years after Brown, when desegregation became a reality but tensions persisted and implementation proved difficult, Gaines's story became a cautionary tale at the University of Missouri.

The Supreme Court of Missouri, which had denied Gaines's admission almost 70 years before, and the state bar association, granted him an honorary posthumous law license.