[4] As a sophomore, Pinkins helped lead the college's NAACP Youth Council chapter, and convinced Lucy to join.
[9] Pinkins was a civil rights activist with the NAACP at the time, and the organization agreed to help the pair fight the university when they heard about the women's applications.
[10] Lucy and Pinkins's attorneys from the NAACP included renowned civil rights lawyers Constance Baker Motley, Arthur Shores and Thurgood Marshall.
Partway through, Marshall helped win another case, Brown v. Board of Education, in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, making racial segregation in public schools illegal.
The Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation gave Lucy and Pinkins full-ride scholarships, and Shores and Jackson helped the pair discuss registration day in advance with the dean of admissions at the university.
[6] After the university was ordered to stop blocking Lucy and Pinkins due to their race, it hired private investigators to find reasons to disqualify the applicants.
Using the university moral codes as justification, it was able to reject Pinkins on the grounds that a child she had conceived before marriage made her an unsuitable student.
[16] Pinkins, Lucy, Jackson, Arthur Brooks, and Fred Shuttlesworth drove to the university on February 1, 1956 with a car and money supplied by Henry Guinn.
They met university officials and newspaper correspondents on the edge of campus, and headed to the registrar's office so that Lucy could register and Pinkins appeal her rejection.
The rioters claimed that the desegregationists were trying to stir up "litigation and strife" for "their own financial gain," echoing the university's justifications for expelling Lucy.