The situation in Louisiana was more chaotic still. The Louisiana legislature unanimously rejected the amendment in February 1867. Reconstruction followed. A constitutional convention was created, composed of forty-nine Negroes and forty-nine Carpetbaggers and Scalawags; it wrote a provision into the Louisiana Constitution that “all children ... shall be admitted to the public schools in common, without distinction of race, color, or previous condition. There shall be no separate schools or institutions of learning established exclusively for any race by the State of Louisiana.” But this language in a coerced State Constitution was ignored by the people. In 1870, the Superintendent of Public Instruction was to complain that the constitutional provision “excites a determined opposition on the part of many who would otherwise cooperate in the opening of schools and in the raising of funds for their support.” As the years passed, Louisiana established a system of racially separate public schools, in accordance with the demonstrable understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment elsewhere in the Union, and a freely chosen constitutional convention in 1898 made segregation mandatory. Florida and Louisiana have been here singled out, because the confused record in the two States offers the best opportunity--indeed, the only opportunity--for a case to be made that _any_ of the States ever understood or contemplated that the Fourteenth Amendment might in any fashion serve to prohibit the operation of racially separate schools. If evidence cannot be adduced here, it cannot be adduced anywhere. And this poor, scanty record of actions taken under duress--and later repudiated under freedom--is the best that hard-laboring historians can produce. What of the other States? In twenty-three other States, positive evidence is available that neither the State conventions nor the State legislatures at any time ever understood or contemplated that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited them from establishing racially separate schools. Look at the record, _first in terms of States outside the South_: _California_ took no action on the Fourteenth Amendment, but it established racially separate schools by statute in 1870, two years after the amendment had been ratified. _Delaware_ refused to ratify the amendment, and made no provision for Negro education of any sort until 1881. Then separate Negro schools were established, and Delaware’s constitution of 1897 made segregation mandatory. How can it be contended that Delaware understood the Fourteenth Amendment to prohibit separate schools?