admit Gaines to the University of Missouri School of Law or to provide another school of equal stature within the state borders. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote for the majority: The case articulated an important rule of law in the sequence of NAACP cases leading to the eventual order for desegregation of public schools: that any academic program that a state provided to whites had to have an equivalent available to blacks. The Gaines holding helped the NAACP lay the foundation for the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, holding that separate facilities for public schools were inherently unequal and ordering such schools to be desegregated, thus overturning Plessy. Since the Supreme Court had ordered the Missouri Supreme Court to rehear the case in light of its ruling, Gaines's legal battle was not over. Historian Gary Lavergne describes Gaines during this period as "high-maintenance": he sought media attention, then complained about how stressful it was being the center of that attention. Heman Marion Sweatt, later the plaintiff in another desegregation case heard by the Supreme Court, worked with Gaines at the University of Michigan. The NAACP had paid for him to attend graduate school there and Sweatt reportedly found Gaines "rather arrogant". After working as a clerk for the Works Progress Administration in Michigan and completing a master's degree in economics, Gaines returned to Missouri in anticipation of the proceedings there, set to begin in August. The Missouri legislature hastily passed a bill appropriating $275,000 ($ in current dollars) to convert an old beauty school in St. Louis into the new Lincoln University School of Law, in the hope that would satisfy the court. The NAACP planned to challenge the establishment of the new law school as still inadequate compared to the resources of the existing University of Missouri School of Law. Gaines, who would need to pay his law school tuition as well as his daily living expenses, looked for work in the meantime. Between the continuing Depression and segregation, he had to settle for work at a gas station. 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