There is great meaning here for the issue that prompts this brief. What the South has said, repeatedly, earnestly, unavailingly, is that the power to operate public schools plainly is a power reserved to the States respectively _by the Constitution_. The power is not delegated to the United States; it is not prohibited to the States by the Constitution; therefore it remains with them. The power to operate public schools necessarily embraces the power to decide what kind of public schools will be operated; and so long as the States do not violate any prohibition laid upon them by the Constitution, they are free to operate whatever schools they please. Their contention is that nothing in the original Constitution of 1788, nothing in the pre-War amendments, nothing in the Reconstruction amendments, and nothing added to the Constitution in this century was intended to prohibit to the States the power to operate racially separate public schools. On the contrary, the South contends that this power plainly was recognized, acknowledged, and judicially sanctioned in States North and South for eighty years after the Fourteenth Amendment became operative; and we deny that a construction so long placed upon the Constitution, in an area of public affairs so vitally and intimately affecting the daily lives of so many millions of persons, validly may be wiped out by a stroke of judicial pens. III The four cases that were to coalesce as _Brown_ v. _Board of Education_ had their beginnings in four widely separated proceedings. In the first of the suits, Harry Briggs, Jr., and forty-five other Negro children of Clarendon County, S. C., brought an action on December 22, 1950, against R. W. Elliott and other members of the county’s School District 22. The following March, in Kansas, Oliver Brown and other colored children filed suit against Topeka’s board of education. In May 1951, Dorothy E. Davis and other Negro plaintiffs in Prince Edward County, Va., launched their proceeding against county officials. Nine months later, in the early spring of 1952, Ethel Louise Belton and others sued for nondiscriminatory admission to the public schools of Hockessin and Wilmington, Del. Each of the suits was carefully coordinated with the others by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and each had the same object--overthrow of the “separate but equal” rule that had governed the operation of racially separate schools since Reconstruction days. Counsel’s plan was to show, first, that school facilities for white and Negro children were not equal as a matter of fact, but this was not so important; beyond this--and it was by far the more significant aim--the object was to prove, as Thurgood Marshall said in South Carolina, that “the segregation of pupils in and of itself is a form of inequality,” and hence a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement of equal protection of the law.