“To the Detriment of the Institution”: The Missouri Student's Fight to Desegregate the University of Missouri

Abstract

This study analyzes the advocacy role of a white university newspaper on behalf of African Americans and desegregation during the two decades prior to the modern civil rights movement. This analysis of the University of Missouri's student-run newspaper focuses on news and editorials in reaction to the early efforts of the NAACP to overturn the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal doctrine. It was in the Missouri Student's backyard that the NAACP mounted its most significant challenge to desegregation in the United States to date with Gaines v. Canada in 1938. In one of the earliest school desegregation cases in American history, the United States Supreme Court ordered Missouri to either allow Lloyd Gaines into the University of Missouri School of Law or establish a law school at the state's only university for blacks. The Gaines decision would ultimately lead to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case in 1954. Starting with Gaines, the Student began a period of robust advocacy for desegregation before World War II, much earlier than the mainstream press took interest in the civil rights story. The Student s stance was noteworthy because the white press traditionally spoke to and for the dominant culture that sought to maintain the status quo.