The Massachusetts court refused to say that the trustees’ decision in behalf of racially separate schools was capricious or arbitrary; such a decision was within their realistic prerogatives, and it denied no child his “civil rights.” The court spoke long before the Civil War, long before there was a Fourteenth Amendment; but the universal understanding of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment was that the amendment neither created nor secured any “new” rights of citizens of the United States--it merely defined and secured, for the emancipated Negro, the civil rights enjoyed by white citizens all along. Serious students of the subject may wish to confirm this from _II Am. Jur. Const. Laws_ (Sect. 255, pages 987-97). The Massachusetts opinion has great weight in establishing, as the formal expression of an abolitionist Northern State, that “civil rights” did not include any right to attend racially integrated schools. If this is of merely academic importance today, the court’s opinion in _Roberts_ v. _Boston_ is significant in determining what the framers and adopters of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866 understood the amendment to mean. They did not mean that it would afford the Negro citizen any more identity of access to public facilities than the Massachusetts court was willing to agree to in 1849. Now, let us leap ahead. The Fourteenth Amendment was proposed in 1866 and declared ratified in 1868; throughout this period, such radical abolitionists as Sumner and Seward were crying for a broad interpretation of the amendment. In Ohio, during the December term of the State Supreme Court in 1871, a suit came on to be heard from William Garnes against John W. McCann and other members of the school board in Franklin County. _This is Ohio._ Its Senators Wade and Sherman cast their votes in the thirty-ninth Congress in favor of the amendment. The State court surely was familiar with their views. Garnes’ complaint was that under State laws of 1853 and 1864 his three children had been denied admission to schools in nearby Norwich; instead, his children were required to attend a Negro school in Hilliard. He brought suit, based entirely on the Fourteenth Amendment, contending that the amendment prohibited Ohio from adopting any school law that permitted or required segregation. His was the first direct test of the intention of the framers and adopters.