In point of fact, it was only the third of these prohibitions that concerned the court. (A right to attend school in any particular State is not a privilege of a “citizen of the United States,” but of a citizen of the State in question; and only by rather far-fetched reasoning could it be contended that by placing white children in one school and Negro children in another school, a State was depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. From the beginning, the plaintiffs’ case rested in an assertion that equal protection had been denied the Negro pupils.) How was the court to be advised if this provision of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited to the States the power to operate racially separate schools? Only one procedure is known to the law; it is the procedure used by the Supreme Court and by other courts from the very beginning of the Republic: _It is to determine the intent of the framers._ What did the Congress and the ratifying States mean by the Fourteenth Amendment? In terms of racially separate public schools, what did they intend the amendment to accomplish? What was their understanding? In construing a written Constitution, an inquiry into intent is paramount. Cooley’s _Limitations_ states the rule in this fashion: A cardinal rule in dealing with written instruments is that they are to receive an unvarying interpretation, and that their practical construction is to be uniform. A Constitution is not to be made to mean one thing at one time, and another at some subsequent time when the circumstances may have so changed as perhaps to make a different rule in the case seem desirable. A principal share of the benefit expected from written Constitutions would be lost if the rules they established were so flexible as to bend to circumstances or be modified by public opinion. It is with special reference to the varying moods of public opinion, and with a view to putting the fundamentals of government beyond their control, that these instruments are framed; and there can be no such steady and imperceptible change in their rules as inheres in the principles of the common law. These beneficent maxims of the common law which guard person and property have grown and expanded until they mean vastly more to us than they did to our ancestors, and are more minute, particular, and pervading in their protections; and we may confidently look forward in the future to still further modifications in the direction of improvement. Public sentiment and action effect such changes, and the courts recognize them; but a court or legislature which should allow a change in public sentiment to influence it in giving construction to a written Constitution not warranted by the intention of its founders, would be justly chargeable with reckless disregard of official oath and public duty.... What a court is to do, therefore, is to declare the law as written, leaving it to the people