When the proposed constitutional amendment reached the floor of the House on May 8, both its friends and its foes reached remarkable agreement on the amendment’s primary purpose: to nail into the Constitution the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that on April 9 had been passed over the President’s veto. Stevens reminded his radical colleagues that a mere law always was subject to repeal by a majority of the House and Senate: “And I need hardly say that the first time that the South with their copperhead allies obtain the command of Congress it will be repealed.” An opponent of the resolution, Rogers of New Jersey, said the Stevens measure “is no more than an attempt to embody in the Constitution of the United States that outrageous and miserable civil rights bill....” On the Senate side, when the resolution came there for debate on May 23, the same view was taken. Howard of Michigan, in charge of the paper, said the object was “to put this question of citizenship and the rights of citizens and freedmen under the civil rights bill beyond the legislative power.” Davis of Kentucky and Henderson of Missouri agreed. On June 8, the Senate voted in favor of the resolution, 33-11, with five Senators not voting; and on June 13 the House, which then had 184 members, completed action by concurring in the Senate amendments, 120-32, with 32 not voting. The House margin was four votes short of the two-thirds required under the Constitution for submitting an amendment, but the resolution was declared to be passed anyhow. While all this was going on, other matters of course were coming before the Congress. One such matter was a bill passed in the Senate on May 21, providing for segregated schools in the District of Columbia. A companion bill, introduced in April, adopted in May, made effective in July, appropriated funds to the Negroes’ segregated schools. And year after year, from that time on until 1954, the Congress continued to provide for racially separate schools in the District of Columbia.