The answer to the court’s first question is perfectly clear: _Of course_ the Congress that submitted the Fourteenth Amendment, and the States that ratified it, did not contemplate or understand that the amendment prohibited to the States the power to maintain segregation in the public schools. If they had contemplated or understood this, they would have abolished such segregation where it existed and shunned it in the schools thereafter. In the simple, homely, undeniable fact that such segregation was not abolished but rather was widely continued lies a complete answer to the court’s question. It should have been a complete answer to the whole case. Evidence to support this view may be adduced overwhelmingly from three principal sources: (1) Actions of the Congress itself; (2) actions of the State legislatures and constitutional conventions; and (3) decisions of State and Federal courts in the period immediately following adoption of the amendment. _1. Actions of the Congress itself._ The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting slavery within the United States, or in any place subject to their jurisdiction, was proposed by the Congress on January 31, 1865, two months before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox was to end the War for Southern Independence. Northern States promptly set the ratification process in motion, and with a cessation of hostilities in April, Southern States came along. During the first week of December 1865, barely ten months after the Thirteenth Amendment had been proposed, the assents of Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia brought the number of ratifications to twenty-seven--three-fourths of the thirty-six States regarded as then “in the Union” for constitutional purposes. On December 18, 1865, Secretary Seward declared the Thirteenth Amendment a part of the Constitution. The Southern States that had been counted as never having left the Union, for purposes of ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, soon discovered that for other purposes they were still out of the Union. They were denied what the Constitution promises every State--representation in the Congress by at least one member of the House and two members of the Senate--and they were permitted no hand in framing the second Reconstruction amendment that was to be submitted the following year. This task became the responsibility of a joint committee of six Senators and nine Congressmen, created in December at the request of Thaddeus Stevens.