Searching for Lloyd Gaines

FAIN: TD-300817-24

Inside Out Media, Inc. (Oakland, CA 94610-1839)
Marc Shaffer (Project Director: January 2024 to present)

Development of a two-hour film examining the pivotal civil rights case Gaines vs. Canada and the mysterious disappearance of the plaintiff. 

A feature documentary tells the full story of Lloyd Gaines, the plaintiff in the first case challenging segregation in education to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Represented by the NAACP, Gaines won a decision requiring the state of Missouri to admit Gaines to the public university's law school, or provide him access to equivalent education within the state. The state immediately opened a new black law school. When the NAACP moved to challenge the state's action, insisting the new school was not the equal to the long-established public university, Gaines had vanished, never to be heard from again. 85 years later, Searching for Lloyd Gaines follows Gaines’s great-niece, Tracy Berry, a veteran criminal prosecutor, as she revisits the case, hunts for elusive answers to his unsolved disappearance, and confronts its painful legacy.