COLUMBIA, Mo. – When I heard rumors that the University of Missouri’s law school was making preparations to award Lloyd Gaines an honorary degree, I had to make the trek midway across the country just to make sure no one was trying to pull a fast one on me.

It is indeed true, as I learned firsthand this week.

If everything goes as planned, Gaines, an African American who tried to integrate the University of Missouri’s all-white law school in 1936 – will finally get his due.

In case you had never heard of him, Gaines was a high school valedictorian who graduated with honors from Lincoln University – a historically black college located in Jefferson City, Mo. – with a bachelor’s degree in history.

In 1936, he applied for admissions to the law school at the University of Missouri. In his application, Gaines wrote: “I am applying to the University of Missouri School of Law with no other hope than that this initial move will ultimately rebound to increase the opportunity for intellectual advancement for the Negro Youth.”

Despite his qualifications, Gaines would never enroll. In April, the university denied his admission on the grounds of race. The state of Missouri gave Gaines the option of either attending an all-black law school that it would build (Missouri did not have any all-black law schools at the time) or having Missouri help pay for him to attend a law school in a neighboring state.

Gaines rejected both of these options, and secured the services of Charles Hamilton Houston, the brilliant Harvard-educated lawyer who along with Thurgood Marshall would challenge “separate but equal” in the Brown v. Board of Education decision. They sued.

Initially, the Boone County court and Missouri Supreme Court ruled in favor of the university, but on December 12, 1938, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-2 decision, ordered the state of Missouri under the “equal protection clause” to provide Gaines with an education equivalent to the legal training that white students were receiving at the University of Missouri.

Alas, Gaines never got a chance to celebrate that Supreme Court victory. On the night of March 19, 1939, Gaines, who was relocated by NAACP officials to Chicago because of intense threats against his life, left the house where he was staying to buy some postage stamps. He was never seen again.

The case remains a mystery and Chicago police still do not know what happened to Gaines, though some suspect he was murdered.

In an effort to fix a historical wrong, the University of Missouri-Columbia renamed its Black Culture Center in honor of the college’s most famous alum who never even attended the university. The law school has erected a plaque and portrait of Gaines in the front entrance of the law school, and a scholarship was created in his honor for deserving minority students.

The biggest tribute could come in just a few months. If all goes as planned, the university will do the honorable thing and award Gaines his degree with this year’s graduating class.

Several years ago, Barnard College made a similar gesture to the longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women, Dorothy Height. They awarded Ms. Height, now 94, with a degree, even though she never attended Barnard. In 1929, she applied to the college but was denied entrance because the school’s quota for black students – only two that year – was full.

“When you look at this face,it’s clear that Lloyd Gaines would have been a promising leader in whatever field he chose,” the dean of Missouri’s law school, Lawrence Dessem, told me while holding a portrait of Gaines.

Mr. Dessem, who is white, has been one of the driving forces behind the effort to grant Gaines his degree.

“It’s just the right thing to do,” he said, adding that African Americans now comprise approximately 8% of the law school population. “It has taken this long but it is the right thing to do.”

If we want an example of how to mend the nation’s ugly legacy of racism, we ought to borrow a lesson from the University of Missouri’s textbook. It’s hard to see it any other way. This is a true example of racial reconciliation.