Tracy Berry did not know she had a great-uncle named Lloyd Gaines until she was nearly fourteen years old, when she read a story on Gaines in the local newspaper. Decades earlier Lloyd had sued the University of Missouri for barring him from attending its law school because he was Black, in 1938 his case becoming the first challenge to segregation to reach the Supreme Court since it had ruled the practice constitutional in 1896.
Represented by an NAACP legal dream team led by senior counsel Charles Hamilton Houston and that included a young Thurgood Marshall, Gaines won a landmark victory. The court declared Missouri's denial of legal education to Blacks a "repugnant" act of discrimination and ordered the state to admit Gaines to its public law school or build one of equal quality for him to attend. Although no one could have known it at the time, Lloyd Gaines's case marked a turning point in American history: The beginning of the end of segregation. Wide-eyed, Tracy discovered she was related to civil rights royalty.
And then, three months after the court's ruling, Lloyd Gaines disappeared, never to be seen again. The University of Missouri would not admit its first African American until 1950. It would not graduate its first Black law student until 1969.
As the years passed, Thurgood Marshall led an NAACP campaign that built on Lloyd's precedent, winning case after case until the court struck down segregation as unconstitutional in 1954. Marshall later called the Gaines case one of "our greatest victories", yet within the Gaines family Lloyd became a phantom, his milestone contribution buried under the trauma of his mysterious absence.
Which is why, when Tracy hungered to know more her family made it clear: Lloyd was never to be spoken of. Even as she became a lawyer herself, and during a long career as a St. Louis prosecutor, Tracy never asked questions. Until now: "I'm searching for Lloyd Gaines but I'm finding myself."
Part historical narrative and part detective story, Searching for Lloyd Gaines follows Tracy from Missouri to Chicago, Washington, D.C., Mexico and Mississippi as she pursues the truth about her great-uncle's historic lawsuit and his unsolved disappearance.