(Kluger, 248-9). The significance of those rulings, however, went beyond the resolution of specific issues. They demonstrated that the Supreme Court of the United States was willing to find that at least some Jim Crow practices violated the constitutional rights of African Americans. Those rulings also encouraged African Americans to bring more challenges to social and political injustice before the Federal courts. Previous success in court beckoned NAACP legal council Charles H. Houston to test the serious issue of equality within graduate and professional education.
             Houston chose to focus on integration at the graduate and professional level because he felt he could force individual states into an impossible position without challenging the Plessy v. Ferguson precedent. Plessy required that equal facilities be provided for all citizens, even if the individuals were barred from one or the other facility because of his or her race. Houston wanted the State of Maryland to face the decision of either having to build impossibly expensive brand new black graduate and professional schools that would finally be equal to their white counterparts or to be forced to enroll blacks in the currently all white schools. Houston won a landmark case in 1936 when the Supreme Court of Maryland ordered that the segregated law school at the University of Maryland accept a black student, Donald Murray, instead of sending him out of the state for his education.
             Another, similar case, Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada went before the Supreme Court in 1938. In a six to two majority the U.S. Supreme Court found that the University of Missouri, by not allowing a black student admission to its law school-although it did create a separate black school- had given an unfair privilege to its white students. The "new" black law school, housed in the same building as a movie theatre and hotel was proven drastically unequal not o...