Arkansas ratified on April 6, 1868. The same military legislature on July 23, 1868, passed a statute directing the State Board of Education to “make the necessary provisions for establishing separate schools for white and colored children.”
Georgia ratified twice, once in 1868 and again in 1870. The latter legislature still was under Reconstruction rule; a majority of both houses were Republicans. But even this legislature, immediately after its renewed ratification of 1870, adopted a school act providing that “the children of the white and colored races shall not be taught together in any sub-district of the State.”
Kentucky, not subject to military reconstruction, rejected the Fourteenth in January 1867. The same legislature provided for racially separate schools, and the State’s constitution of 1891 required them.
Mississippi’s legislature, dominated by Republicans and Negroes, ratified the Amendment in 1870 and simultaneously provided for a public school system. It was a segregated system, though the law did not require this specifically. Segregation was made mandatory in the schools in 1878.
North Carolina ratified in July 1868. The following winter saw enactment of a statute directing local school authorities to establish “separate schools for the instruction of children and youth of each race.”
South Carolina’s Reconstruction constitutional convention (seventy-six Negroes, forty-eight Carpetbaggers) directed the forthcoming State legislature to establish a public school system free to all children “without regard to race or color,” but the Reconstruction legislature (only twenty-two of its 155 members could read or write) paid no attention to the provision. The Governor was a brevet brigadier general from Maine, Robert K. Scott. In his Inaugural Address he told the assembled illiterate Negroes and white legislators quite frankly that he deemed racial separation in the schools “of the greatest importance to all classes of our people.” Listen to what this Union Governor of South Carolina said, on the very day after the South Carolina legislature had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment:
While the moralist and philanthropist cheerfully recognizes the fact that “God hath made of one blood all nations of men” yet the statesman in legislating for a political society that embraces two distinct, and in some measure, antagonistic races, in the great body of its electors, must, as far as the law of equal rights will permit, take cognizance of existing prejudices among both. In school districts, where the white children may be preponderate in numbers, the colored children may be oppressed, or partially excluded from the schools, while the same result may accrue to the whites, in those districts where colored children are in the majority, unless they shall be separated by law as herein recommended. [Emphasis supplied.]
South Carolina’s legislature adopted Governor Scott’s recommendation. A Massachusetts Negro became State Superintendent of Public Instruction; and he presided over the establishment of a system of segregated schools.
A reconstructed legislature in Texas ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in February 1870. The same legislature provided for public schools to be operated by trustees who “may make any separation of the students or schools necessary to insure success.” Segregated schools were made mandatory in Texas by the Constitution of 1876.
Finally, Virginia. The Old Dominion’s first legislature under the Reconstruction Constitution of 1869 ratified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Federal Constitution, and then adjourned until the State’s representatives were readmitted to Congress. Then the same legislature reconvened and promptly enacted a statute providing for a system of free schools under a requirement that “white and colored persons shall not be taught in the same schools, but in separate schools.”