Would an act of Congress prohibiting the States from maintaining racially separate schools be “appropriate legislation, enforcing the provisions of this article”? The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not think so. They did not regard the right to attend a particular school as a “civil right.” Well after the amendment became operative, Sumner and other abolitionist leaders in the Congress several times introduced legislation having this end; twice they got such a bill through the Senate (1872 and 1874), on tie votes broken by the Vice-President, but they were never able to get a bill through the House. And in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, an effort to prohibit racially separate schools was defeated decisively. The power vested in Congress in the fifth section is no general grant of power. It is limited to legislation appropriate to enforcing the provisions “of this article.” And until it can be shown that one of the provisions “of this article” was intended to prohibit to the States the power to maintain racially separate schools, it cannot be shown that Congress appropriately could enact legislation having that end. No provision of the Fourteenth Amendment imposes such a prohibition on the States. Therefore, no act of the Congress validly could seek to enforce such a prohibition. And surely it is all the more evident, to get at Questions 2 (b) and 3, that nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment, or in any other provision of the Constitution or act of Congress, ever was intended to give the Supreme Court the power to abolish segregation in public schools by its own fiat. If the power to accomplish this end rested in Federal authority at all, it rested in the hands of the Congress. The court might decide whether an act of the Congress prohibiting such schools in the States were “appropriate legislation” to enforce provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the court has no legislative authority of any sort. As the court itself said in the _Slaughter-House Cases_, the amendment was not intended to make the court “a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the States, on the civil rights of their own citizens, with authority to nullify such as it did not approve as consistent with those rights as they existed at the time of the adoption of this amendment.” Question 3, it will be noticed, goes beyond Question 2 (b). In Question 2 (b), the court was still concerned with the intention of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment: Did the framers understand in 1866 that some day the court, in the light of future conditions, could construe the amendment to abolish school segregation of its own force? But in Question 3, the framers are abandoned: Is it within the judicial power _today_, the court inquired, without regard to history, for the court itself to abolish school segregation by placing a new construction on the amendment? In the brief they filed in response to the court’s inquiries, attorneys for the Southern States said this: