In November 1908, the Supreme Court considered a suit brought by Berea College against the Commonwealth of Kentucky (211 U. S. 45). Berea, a private college, had been operating as a racially integrated institution. A State law was enacted making it unlawful for any corporation chartered in Kentucky to maintain a private school on such a basis. On the grounds that the law was within Kentucky’s power to regulate Kentucky corporations, a majority of the Supreme Court held the law valid. Harlan dissented warmly. He thought Berea’s right to admit pupils of its own choosing to its classrooms was “a liberty inherent in the freedom secured by fundamental law,” but he did not wish to be misunderstood: “Of course what I have said has no reference to regulations prescribed for public schools, established at the pleasure of the State and maintained at the public expense.” Six years later, the generic question of “separate but equal” was again before the Supreme Court, in _McCabe_ v. _Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Company_ (235 U. S. 151). A Negro passenger had sued to halt enforcement of an Oklahoma law requiring racial separation on coaches. The trial court had dismissed the suit by calling attention to _Plessy_ and saying that the power of the States to require separate but equal accommodations “could no longer be considered an open question.” Said Hughes for a unanimous Supreme Court: “There is no reason to doubt the correctness of that conclusion.” Thirteen years elapsed. Membership on the court changed. On November 21, 1927, when the court decided _Gong Lum_ v. _Rice_ (275 U. S. 78), Taft was Chief Justice; his brothers included such giants of the law as Holmes, Brandeis, and Stone. The question of the power of the States to maintain racially separate but equal schools was put squarely before the court. Mississippi had insisted that a Chinese child, Martha Lum, attend a Negro high school in Bolivar County instead of a white high school. This was what Taft said, speaking for a _unanimous_ court: The question here is whether a Chinese citizen of the United States is denied equal protection of the laws when he is classed among the colored races and furnished facilities for education equal to that offered to all, whether white, brown, yellow or black. Were this a new question, it would call for very full argument and consideration, but we think that it is the same question which has been many times decided to be within the constitutional power of the State legislature to settle without intervention of the Federal courts under the Federal Constitution.... The decision is within the discretion of the State in regulating its public schools, _and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment_. [Emphasis supplied.]