_3. Decisions of State and Federal courts in the period immediately following adoption of the amendment._ Confronting this overwhelming evidence, counsel for the Negro plaintiffs desperately attempted to establish what might be called a conspiracy theory, so far as the Southern States were concerned: These States, it was suggested, knew all along that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to prohibit them from maintaining separate schools, but they conspired to deceive the rest of the nation until they were formally readmitted to the Union and Reconstruction had ended. This theory does not justify even the contempt with which defense counsel brushed it aside. The plain and visible fact is that racially separate schools were everywhere recognized and accepted as fully in compliance with the new constitutional provisions. It is not necessary to seek evidence of this recognition in Southern States alone, nor to rely upon the interpretation that “politicians” may have put upon the amendment here and there. Let us turn from Congress and the State legislatures, and see what the courts said about the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment in the years immediately following its ratification in 1868. The clock should be turned back first to 1849, nineteen years before the ratification of the amendment, when Sarah C. Roberts, a five-year-old Negro girl, brought suit against the City of Boston (59 Mass. 198) in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Boston then had two primary schools exclusively for Negroes, one on Belknap Street, in the Eighth School District, the other on Sun Court Street, in the Second. Negroes made up one sixty-second of Boston’s population, but among this one sixty-second was Sarah Roberts, a resident of the Sixth District on Andover Street. She wanted to attend the white school nearest her. Charles Sumner and R. Morris, Jr., brought suit in her behalf, contending as many others were to contend in subsequent years that Sarah had a right to attend her neighborhood school, and that Boston had no right to make classification by race. The suit came on to be heard before Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw and others. This, to repeat, was many years prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, but the question put to the court was to be the question argued many times thereafter: What are the “privileges” of the individual citizens? Where do the powers of the state end in terms of a racial classification for schoolchildren? This is Boston, 1849: