Painstakingly, counsel for the Southern States called the roll of precedents supporting--or not disturbing--the long-established doctrine of “separate but equal.” The _Plessy_ case of 1896 had been followed in December 1899 by _Cumming_ v. _Richmond County Board of Education_ (175 U. S. 528). Here the facts were that a Georgia county had closed its Negro high school and required local Negro high school students to go into Augusta for schooling, in order to convert the high school to the needs of three-hundred elementary pupils. The Negro high school pupils sought an injunction to upset this arrangement. And though the denial of equal facilities locally might seem plain, a _unanimous_ Supreme Court found no merit in the Negroes’ claim. Some of the students might be inconvenienced by the requirement that they attend one of the three Negro high schools in nearby Augusta, but their inconvenience had to be set against the needs of the elementary children. Further, nothing constructive would be gained by closing the white high school merely because the Negro high school was no longer operating. “Under the circumstances disclosed,” said the court, “we cannot say that this action ... was, _within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment_, a denial by the State to the plaintiffs and those associated with them of the equal protection of the law, or of any privileges belonging to them as citizens of the United States. The education of the people in schools maintained by State taxation is a matter belonging to the respective States, and any interference on the part of Federal authority with the management of such schools cannot be justified except in the case of a clear and unmistakable disregard of rights secured by the supreme law of the land.” [Emphasis supplied.] It is curious, one may note in passing, that persons who so reverently admire Mr. Justice Harlan’s dissent of 1896 in _Plessy_ customarily fail altogether to acknowledge that it was Mr. Justice Harlan who spoke in 1899 for a unanimous court in _Cumming_. The court’s pronouncement in _Cumming_ was cited the following year in the New York Court of Appeals (161 N. Y. 598), when Negro petitioners challenged the right and power of Queens Borough to maintain separate schools. The New York court refused to disturb the system: “It is equal school facilities and accommodations that are required to be furnished, and not equal social opportunities.”