The _Gong Lum_ case was in 1927. Eleven years later the Supreme Court dealt with a suit brought by Lloyd Gaines, a Negro, seeking admission to the law school of the University of Missouri (305 U. S. 337). The _Gaines_ case is important, because it sometimes is said that it heralded in 1938 the end of “separate but equal” in 1954. It did no such thing. The State of Missouri then had no law school for Negroes; the practice was to pay tuition fees, out of State, for the few Negro students seeking legal education. Other Negro college students attended Lincoln University in St. Louis, where Missouri sought to fulfill its obligation to provide the same general advantages of higher education for Negroes that it provided for whites by furnishing equal facilities in separate schools. Chief Justice Hughes said for the court that this was a method, “_the validity of which has been sustained by our decisions_.” He was sympathetic to Missouri’s plan to build Lincoln University into an institution genuinely equal to the University of Missouri at Columbia. “But commendable as is that action, the fact remains that instruction in law for Negroes is not now afforded by the State, either at Lincoln University or elsewhere.” The court therefore ordered Gaines admitted to the Missouri Law School. McReynolds dissented, with Butler joining him. They felt Missouri’s offer to pay Gaines’ tuition in a nearby law school of good standing would provide the student with abundant opportunity to study law “if perchance that is the thing really desired.” In attempting in good faith to meet the constitutionally sanctioned requirements of separate but equal, said McReynolds, “the State should not be unduly hampered through theorization inadequately restrained by experience.”