In 1938, Lloyd Gaines filed a lawsuit after being denied admission to the University of Missouri Law School in 1935 because he was black. The Court ruled in his favor & required Missouri to admit him or set up a black law school. He disappeared 3 months later never to be found. —Lloyd Lionel Gaines was born to the Gaines family in northern Mississippi in 1911. One of eleven children, seven of whom survived illness and accident, he moved with his widowed mother and siblings to St. Louis after the premature death of their father. They found a better, although not easy, life for themselves in Missouri. Gaines excelled in his studies graduating as valedictorian in 1931 from Vashon High School. At Lincoln University in Jefferson City, he graduated with honors and was President of the senior class, while participating in many extra-curricular activities and working to pay for his schooling. Despite his outstanding scholastic record, the University of Missouri School of Law denied Gaines admittance in 1936 solely on the grounds that Missouri's Constitution called for "separate education of the races." By state law, Missouri would have been required to pay for Gaines to attend the Universities in Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, but Gaines was determined to fight for the right to attend law school in his own state university. He sought legal assistance from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been working systematically to overturn the ignominious precedent of "separate but equal" established in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Together, they challenged the University of Missouri's admissions policies. In 1938, Gaines won his case before the United States Supreme Court in State of Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada, paving the way for a series of cases that would lead to Brown v. Board of Education's outlawing segregation in public education. In March 1939, only three months after his Supreme Court victory, Lloyd Gaines was last seen in Chicago. He disappeared at age 28 with his promise of attending law school in Missouri unfilfilled. Lloyd Gaines was never to be seen or heard from again.

Easter morning, Southside, Chicago, Illinois, April 1941. The only one of the five boys that’s identified is the tall, hatless teenager in the middle, named Spencer Lee Readus, Jr., who was 14 when the photo was taken. Spencer Lee went on to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II and build a career as a plaster foreman. According to his daughter, he remembered the day as, “I was going to the show on Easter Sunday and a white man approached me to ask if he could take a picture of me and these other boys.”

The origin of Memorial Day trace back to 1865 when freed slaves started a tradition to honor fallen Union soldiers and to celebrate emancipation and commemorate those who died for that cause. A THREAD

On this day in 1939, Billie Holiday recorded the first great protest song of the Civil Rights Movement, 'Strange Fruit’ The Chilling Story of Strange Fruit and Billie Holiday. A THREAD!

So who taught a young Jack Daniel how to distill what would become the world’s best-selling whiskey? —Nathan "Nearest" Green, an enslaved Black master distiller, taught distilling techniques to Jack Daniel, founder of the Jack Daniel Tennessee whiskey.