The Southern Case for School Segregation

by James Jackson Kilpatrick

No such construction ever had been intended. The privileges and immunities of a school system “are derived solely from the constitution and laws of the State.” If Ohio were to abolish all public schools, it scarcely could be claimed that a “citizen of the United States” could compel Ohio to re-establish them. This being so, Garnes could demand no more than equal protection under the laws of Ohio. And this had not been denied him. His children were assured their “equal proportion of the school fund.” (The court’s assertion on this score is important to establish the point that the doctrine of “separate but equal” arose at the very outset of litigation on school segregation.) This was all Garnes was entitled to demand. “A classification of the youth of the State for school purposes, upon any basis which does not exclude either class from equal school advantages, is no infringement of the equal rights of citizens secured by the constitution of the State.” And the Fourteenth Amendment, at most, affords colored citizens only an additional guaranty of rights already secured to them by the State Constitution.

In brief, the plaintiff Garnes could not validly complain that the privileges of his children were abridged, or that equal protection of the law had been denied them. “Equality of rights does not involve the necessity of educating white and colored persons in the same school, any more than it does that of educating children of both sexes in the same school.” And the court added:

Any classification which preserves substantially equal school advantages is not prohibited by either the State or Federal Constitution, nor would it contravene the provisions of either. There is, then, no ground upon which the plaintiff can claim that his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment have been infringed.

This view of the Fourteenth Amendment, stated by the Supreme Court of Ohio in 1871, was accepted the following year by the United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of Ohio. In United States v. Buntin (10 Fed. 730), Circuit Judge Baxter summarized the Garnes case as a holding that segregation is “within the constitutional discretion of the legislature, and that the separate education of the whites and blacks ... is no wrong to either.” Said the Federal Circuit Court in Ohio: “I concur in and adopt this decision as a correct exposition of the Constitution.”

The same question twice presented in Ohio cropped up again in 1872 in Nevada. Surely Nevada was no Southern State, nor could the views of its State Supreme Court have been tainted by any Confederate conspiracy. Both of Nevada’s Senators, Nye and Stewart, had voted in 1866 in favor of the amendment. But in Stoutmeyer v. Duffy (7 Nev. 342), the State court found nothing whatever in the Fourteenth Amendment to compel the admission of a seven-year-old Negro boy to the white schools of Ormsby County. His denial was a violation of State law, said the court, but not of Federal law. A concurring justice thought it “utterly untenable” that segregated schools, as such, should be held a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In January 1874, the same question arose in California. It cannot be suggested seriously that the Supreme Court of California in Ward v. Flood (48 Calif. 36) was then acting in some joint conspiracy with the invidious Alabamans. Young Mary Frances Ward demanded admission to the white Broadway Grammar School in San Francisco; Principal Noah F. Flood, acting under State law, declined. Was his action a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment? Plainly not, said the California court. In the mere fact that the races are separated in the public schools “there is certainly to be found no violation of the constitutional rights of the one race more than of the other, and we see none of either, for each, though separated from the other, is to be educated upon equal terms with that other, and both at the common public expense.”

Eleven months later, in November 1874, the same question came up in Indiana. Who would regard Indiana as a Southern State? The case was Cory v. Carter (48 Ind. 327). Here a Negro resident of Lawrence township in Marion County demanded admission of his grandchildren to the nearest local schools. An act of Indiana in May 1869, nearly a year after ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, required their education at nearby Negro schools. Was the State act, as the petitioner complained, in violation of the new amendment to the Constitution? Not at all, said the Supreme Court of Indiana. The new Fourteenth Amendment was not intended to prohibit to the State the power of operating separate schools for white and Negro children. This was a question of “domestic policy,” to be settled by State law:

In other words, the placing of the white children of the State in one class and the Negro children of the State in another class and requiring these classes to be taught separately, provision being made for their education in the same branches, with capable teachers, and to the extent of their pro rata share in the school revenue, does not amount to a denial of equal privileges to either, or conflict with the open character of the system required by the Constitution. The system would be equally open to all. The tuition would be free. The privileges of the schools would be denied to none. The white children go to one school, or to certain of the schools in the system of common schools. The colored children go to another school, or to certain others of the schools in the system of common schools.... If there be cause of complaint, the white class has as much, if not greater cause than the colored class, for the latter class receive their full share of the school revenue, although none of it may have been contributed by such class....

And in a telling section of its opinion, the Indiana court went on to make the point that Congress itself had fixed the spirit and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment by adopting legislation requiring racially segregated schools in the District of Columbia. The court called attention to the dates of such legislation: July 23, 1866; July 28, 1866; March 3, 1873. These acts of Congress were contemporaneous with adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. It seemed to the Indiana court unthinkable that the Congress should have fixed some standard for the States less than that required of the central government, and surely Congress itself, having framed the amendment, knew what was intended by the amendment: “This legislation of Congress continues in force ... as a legislative construction of the Fourteenth Amendment, and as a legislative declaration of what was thought to be lawful, proper, and expedient under such amendment, by the same body that proposed such amendment to the States for their approval and ratification.”

Now, to maintain the chronology, consider one case from a Southern State: Arnold Bertonneau v. Board of Directors of [New Orleans] City Schools (3 Woods 177, 3 Fed. Cases 294, Case No. 1,361). This was decided by a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in November 1878. The Fourteenth Amendment was then ten years old. The question, brought by the Negro father of two boys, seven and nine years old, was whether under the Fourteenth Amendment they were entitled to admission to a white school three blocks from their home on Rampart Street. A Negro school was also conveniently available. The Reconstruction Constitution of Louisiana then carried the provision, earlier quoted, that no separate schools should be established for any race under State law. But the Federal court had no concern for the State Constitution. Its sole concern was with the United States Constitution, and Circuit Judge William B. Woods found no violation of it in the schools of the Vieux Carré. Woods, incidentally, was an Ohioan; he had been a general in the Union Army; in 1880 he was to be named by Hayes to the U.S. Supreme Court. Here he said: