We cannot see why the establishment of separate institutions for the education and benefit of different races should be held any more to imply the inferiority of one race than that of the other, and no ground for such an implication exists in the act of discrimination itself. If it could be shown that the accommodations afforded to one race were inferior to those enjoyed by another, some advance might be made in the argument, but until that is established, no basis is laid for a claim that the privileges of the respective races are not equal.... A natural distinction exists between those races which was not created, neither can it be abrogated, by law, and legislation which recognizes this distinction and provides for the peculiar wants or conditions of the particular race can in no just sense be called a discrimination against such race or an abridgment of its civil rights. The implication that the Congress of 1866, and the New York State legislature of the same year, sitting during the very throes of our civil war, who were respectively the authors of legislation providing for the separate education of the two races, were thereby guilty of unfriendly discrimination against the colored race, will be received with surprise by most people and with conviction by none.... And the New York court went on to make the same point earlier made in Indiana, that “the highest authority for the interpretation of this amendment is afforded by the action of those sessions of Congress which not only immediately preceded, but were also contemporaneous with, the adoption of the amendment in question.” If Congress could establish schools exclusively for Negroes, as it repeatedly had done, no good reason could be suggested why a greater restriction should apply to the States. “If regard be had to that established rule for the construction of statutes and constitutional enactments which require courts, in giving them effect, to regard the intent of the law-making power, it is difficult to see why the considerations suggested are not controlling upon the question under discussion.” That was New York speaking, only fifteen years after ratification of the amendment, in 1883. Did _King_ v. _Gallagher_ say nothing at all, in 1954, to the Supreme Court of the United States? Was this opinion not directly responsive to the court’s question of whether the States understood or contemplated that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to prohibit separate schools?