The school system in New Orleans now made, as we have seen, provision for the separate instruction of whites and blacks. The right of the School Board to establish the different schools had been attacked in the celebrated Trevique case, in 1877; it was again made the subject of litigation in 1879. A colored man, Bertonneau, brought suit in equity to compel the city to admit his children to the white schools. Judge W. B. Woods of the United States Circuit Court, who decided the case, declared that no injury had been done the plaintiff, as the rule of the School Board applied equally to white and black, each race being required to attend its own schools and not being permitted to enter the others. "Any classification which provides substantially equal school facilities does not impair any right, and is not prohibited by the Constitution of the United States. Equality of right does not imply identity of right." This decision was received with great satisfaction by the people of the city, to whom the matter of separate schools had become important especially as representing the definite collapse of radical legislation on the subject.


John Smith Kendall
History of New Orleans
(1922)