another black student initially denied admission. In 2006 Gaines was posthumously granted an honorary law degree. The state bar granted him a posthumous law license. A portrait of Gaines hangs in the University of Missouri law school building. Early life Born in 1911 in Water Valley, Mississippi, Gaines moved with his mother and siblings to St. Louis, Missouri in 1926 after the death of their father. Part of the Great Migration from rural communities in the South to industrial cities in the North, his family settled in the city's Central West End neighborhood. Gaines did well academically, and was a valedictorian at Vashon High School. After winning a $250 ($ in current dollars) scholarship in an essay contest, Gaines went to college. He graduated with honors and a bachelor's degree in history from Lincoln University, a historically black college in Jefferson City, Missouri. It was the state's segregated undergraduate institution for African Americans. To cover the gap between his scholarship and the college's tuition, he sold magazines on the street. Gaines was elected as president of the senior class and a brother in the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Law school application Following his 1935 graduation, during the Great Depression, Gaines unsuccessfully sought work as a teacher. Around that time, NAACP lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston was looking for a plaintiff to bring a case challenging Missouri's Jim Crow laws that restricted the University of Missouri to white students. He sent St. Louis lawyer Sidney Redmond, one of three dozen African Americans then admitted to the Missouri bar, to visit the university's Columbia campus, with instructions to take pictures of buildings that housed departments and courses of study not available at Lincoln University, and obtain admission forms. In June 1935, Gaines had requested a catalog and admission form from Sy Woodson Canada, registrar, of the University of Missouri Law School. They were sent to his address at Lincoln in Jefferson City. By August he applied for admission, encouraged by Lorenzo Greene, a Lincoln University professor and veteran civil rights activist. Accounts vary as to whether Gaines did this on his own initiative or was encouraged by the NAACP, in order to have a plaintiff, without any interest in a legal career. When Redmond informed Houston that Gaines was willing to be a plaintiff, Houston initially asked for another candidate. Houston later accepted Gaines, when it became apparent he was the only available