High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Lloyd Lionel Gaines (1911, Water Valley, Mississippi – disappeared March 19, 1939, Chicago) was the plaintiff in Gaines v. Canada (1938), one of the most important court cases in the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1930s. After being denied admission to the University of Missouri School of Law because he was African American, and refusing the university`s offer to pay for him to attend another neighboring state`s law school with no racial restriction, he filed suit. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in his favor, holding that the separate but equal doctrine required that Missouri either admit him or set up a separate law school for African American students.