was a private corporation and not an entity of the state subject to the fourteenth amendment. It
was established by a private gift from Enoch Pratt. He gave the property to the city on condition
that the city make annual appropriations of a fixed sum for the library and that the operation and
management of the library be under the supervision of a self perpetuating Board of Trustees
initially selected by him. Pratt's conditions were designed to avoid enmeshing the library in local
politics. Judge Chestnut found that control by the Board of Trustees made the library a private
corporation.

In Kerr v. Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore City.120 Judge Soper and the Fourth
Circuit reversed Chestnut's decision. The Court said that the operation of a public library was a
traditional public function and noted that the Pratt Library was owned by the city and financed
almost entirely from city and state funds. The Fourth Circuit then held that the Board of Trustees
were bound by the restrictions of the fourteenth amendment in managing the institution, and
ordered them to admit Ms. Kerr to the training program.

C.        Education

Juanita Jackson Mitchell often tells of the inspiring effect of Charles Houston, the dean of
Howard University Law School. He came to speak at the Young Peoples Forum and told the
audience that the law gave them the weapon to end discrimination. The Constitution guaranteed
"equal protection," he said, and blacks should sue to secure that promised "equality." Houston's
speech was a description of the strategy of the NAACP. In 1929 the organization received a
grant of $100,000 from the Garland Fund. With funds available to conduct litigation, Nathan
Margold was retained to draw up a plan of action. The 1931 Margold report rejected as too
costly and ineffective the initial proposals to bring individual suits to secure equal funding for
negro schools. Such suits would require individual inquiries in every jurisdiction on an annual
basis. On the other hand, a frontal attack on segregation offered little hope in view of the
precedents of the Court. Lower courts would have dismissed such suits for failure to state a
cause of action and the Supreme Court would probably have dismissed appeals for want of a
substantial federal question. Instead, Margold proposed to attack segregation itself as then
administered as denying equality. Like the nineteenth century transportation cases, petitioners
would sue to obtain the remedy of integrated services without attacking the abstract propriety of
segregation. The organization sponsored several suits before attempting to open up higher
education.121 The first education suit was in North Carolina where Thomas Hocutt sued for
admission to the state pharmacy school in 1933. Hocutt lost because the court found he had not
established his qualifications for admission.122

No such problems of qualifications existed for Donald Gaines Murray. A graduate of
Amherst College, he was clearly academically prepared for law school. At the urging of attorney
William Gosnell, Murray wrote the President of the University of Maryland to inquire about
admission to the law school. President Pearson responded that the legislature had created partial
scholarships at out of state institutions for negro students desiring to do graduate or professional
courses not given at Princess Anne Academy (the black state school, now UMES). If Murray

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