The roots of the student-led movement that spurred the resignations this week of University of Missouri’s president and chancellor, Tim Wolfe and R. Bowen Loftin, respectively—can be traced back to Yalobusha County.
Water Valley (current pop: 3,392) is the birthplace of Lloyd Gaines, who won a 1938 U.S. Supreme Court case to become the first African American student to gain admission to the University of Missouri.
Born in 1911, Gaines and his family moved to St. Louis in 1926 during the Great Migration. After graduating from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Mo., he applied to but was rejected from Missouri’s law school because he was African American. However, the nation’s high court ruled that Missouri had to admit Gaines or build a law school for black students, so Mizzou chose to let him in.
The case later provided the legal backbone for Brown v. Board of Education in 1955, which struck down legal segregation. Despite his court victory, Gaines vanished before he took even one class.
It wasn’t until 1950 that the first black students attended the school. Over the years, student activists fought for a monument to Gaines. A plaque commemorating him is now displayed in the law school. In 2001, the Gaines name was added to the name of Black Culture Center. A hub of African American campus activism, the Gaines/Oldham Black Culture Center is where a group of Mizzou football players, who joined protests over racist incidents at the school, posed for a photograph that went viral over the weekend.
