To complete the record of school decisions directly in point, prior to the Supreme Court’s opinion of 1896 in _Plessy_ v. _Ferguson_, one final case should be mentioned. This was _Lehew_ v. _Brummell_ (15 S.W. 765), decided by the Supreme Court of Missouri in March 1891. Both the Missouri Constitution and a State act of 1887 then required racially separate schools. Five Negro children of Grundy County attacked the requirement as violative of both the “privileges and immunities” and “equal protection” provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Missouri court rejected both contentions. “The right of children to attend the public schools, and of parents to send their children to them, is not a privilege or immunity belonging to a citizen of the United States as such. It is a right created by the State, and a right belonging to citizens of the State as such.” On the second point, separation of pupils by race was not an unreasonable or arbitrary classification, for color carries with it natural race peculiarities, which furnish the reason for the classification. There are differences in races, and between individuals of the same race, not created by human laws, some of which can never be eradicated. These differences create different social relations, recognized by all well-ordered governments. If we cast aside chimerical theories and look to practical results, it seems to us it must be conceded that separate schools for colored children is a regulation to their great advantage.... The fact that the two races are separated for the purpose of receiving instruction deprives neither of any rights. It is a reasonable regulation of the exercise of the right. Mention of the _Lehew_ case in Missouri brings this chronology of judicial pronouncements on racially separate schools to the Supreme Court’s famous statement in _Plessy_. With that landmark in sight, the citizen seeking to learn what the framers intended the Fourteenth Amendment to accomplish should pause to read two other monumental Supreme Court opinions--the _Slaughter-House Cases_ of 1873 (16 Wallace 36) and the _Civil Rights Cases_ of 1883 (109 U. S. 3). They do not deal directly with a State’s power to operate racially separate public schools, but they do speak eloquently of the whole meaning of the Reconstruction amendments as that meaning was understood by those closest to it.