The Southern Case for School SegregationKilpatrick, James Jackson
History
The Southern Case for School Segregation
Kilpatrick, James Jackson
African Americans -- Segregation; Segregation -- Southern States
This view of the Fourteenth Amendment, stated by the Supreme Court
of Ohio in 1871, was accepted the following year by the United
States Circuit Court for the Southern District of Ohio. In _United
States_ v. _Buntin_ (10 Fed. 730), Circuit Judge Baxter summarized
the _Garnes_ case as a holding that segregation is “within the
constitutional discretion of the legislature, and that the separate
education of the whites and blacks ... is no wrong to either.” Said
the Federal Circuit Court in Ohio: “I concur in and adopt this
decision as a correct exposition of the Constitution.”
The same question twice presented in Ohio cropped up again in 1872
in Nevada. Surely Nevada was no Southern State, nor could the views
of its State Supreme Court have been tainted by any Confederate
conspiracy. Both of Nevada’s Senators, Nye and Stewart, had voted in
1866 in favor of the amendment. But in _Stoutmeyer_ v. _Duffy_ (7
Nev. 342), the State court found nothing whatever in the Fourteenth
Amendment to compel the admission of a seven-year-old Negro boy
to the white schools of Ormsby County. His denial was a violation
of State law, said the court, but not of Federal law. A concurring
justice thought it “utterly untenable” that segregated schools, as
such, should be held a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
In January 1874, the same question arose in California. It cannot be
suggested seriously that the Supreme Court of California in _Ward_
v. _Flood_ (48 Calif. 36) was then acting in some joint conspiracy
with the invidious Alabamans. Young Mary Frances Ward demanded
admission to the white Broadway Grammar School in San Francisco;
Principal Noah F. Flood, acting under State law, declined. Was his
action a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment? Plainly not, said
the California court. In the mere fact that the races are separated
in the public schools “there is certainly to be found no violation
of the constitutional rights of the one race more than of the other,
and we see none of either, for each, though separated from the other,
is to be educated upon equal terms with that other, and both at the
common public expense.”
Eleven months later, in November 1874, the same question came up in
Indiana. Who would regard Indiana as a Southern State? The case was
_Cory_ v. _Carter_ (48 Ind. 327). Here a Negro resident of Lawrence
township in Marion County demanded admission of his grandchildren
to the nearest local schools. An act of Indiana in May 1869, nearly
a year after ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, required
their education at nearby Negro schools. Was the State act, as the
petitioner complained, in violation of the new amendment to the
Constitution? Not at all, said the Supreme Court of Indiana. The new
Fourteenth Amendment was not intended to prohibit to the State the
power of operating separate schools for white and Negro children.
This was a question of “domestic policy,” to be settled by State law:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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