Complete Coverage

In Black and White

In 1899, on the threshold of a new century, a little-known court case out of Georgia set the tone for the battle against educational apartheid that was to emerge as one of America's most searing social struggles of the next 100 years.

Pleading poverty, the Augusta school board had shut down the public high school for blacks. The city's African-American residents fought the move all the way to the nation's highest court. Cumming v. Richmond County Board of Education, as it was known, marked the first time the U.S. Supreme Court had directly confronted the issue of racial discrimination in the schools.

Coming just three years after the famous 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld a Louisiana law requiring "separate but equal" rail cars for blacks and whites, the Georgia case raised the question of how the justices would apply that principle to public education. For those who believed that "equal" should mean just that, the case offered a chance to establish that black schoolchildren deserved the same educational...