l control of the legislative process
itself.

Although the courts had usually interpreted the Constitution so as to
support segregation, much of that document's language supported
democratic and equalitarian principles. If the courts could be persuaded
to understand the Constitution differently, legal segregation might well
be found to be unconstitutional. The judicial system to some degree
reacts to popular pressure and events, and it too was influenced by the
need to justify American democracy to the rest of the world.

The N.A.A.C.P. had already mounted a broad, concerted attack against
legal segregation before the Second World War. When Walter White defeated
W. E. B. DuBois in a struggle for leadership, he confirmed the
Association's emphasis on striving for an integrated society. The number
of white and middle-class black supporters of the N.A.A.C.P. grew, and
its treasury prospered. The Association chose to concentrate its efforts
on a gradual, relentless attack against segregation through the courts.
Believing that education was an all-important factor in society, it
decided that school desegregation should become the major target.

Thurgood Marshall was the master strategist in the school desegregation
campaign. He decided that the attack should be a slow, indirect one.
Most Southern school systems, although they had developed two separate
institutions, had not established separate graduate and professional
facilities for Negroes. Marshall decided to attack the school question
on the graduate, professional, and law-school level. First, Southerners
did not seem as frightened about racial mixing on the graduate school
level, and second, the cost of developing separate graduate and
professional schools for a handful of Negro students, it was reasoned,
would be prohibitive.

In 1938, in Gaines v. Canada, the Supreme Court declared that Missouri's
failure to admit a Negro, Lloyd Gaines, to the state law school, when the
state did not have a comparable "separate but equal" institution for
Negroes, constituted a violation of the "equal-protection" clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment. Missouri wanted to solve the problem by paying the
student's tuition in an integrated Northern law school, but the Court
refused to accept that as a solution. It argued that the state had
already created a privilege for whites which it was denying to Negroes.
This, in itself, was a Constitutional violation.

A decade passed without