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8 Unbound: Rev. Legal Hist. & Rare Books 31 (2015)
Williams v. Board of Education of Fairfax District: Bringing a Long-Forgotten West Virginia Case to Life

handle is hein.journals/unbound8 and id is 31 raw text is: UNBOUND Williams v. Board of Education of Fairfax District: Bringing a Long- forgotten West Virginia Case to Life Mark W. Podvia* In recent years, a long-forgotten Civil Rights decision by the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals has gained public attention, largely thanks to the work of the J.R. Clifford Project. That case, Williams v. Board of Education of Fairfax District, 31 S.E. 985 (W. Va. 1898), had upheld an earlier decision issued by the Circuit Court of Tucker County that required that schools must offer students-both black and white- equal school terms. The Fairfax School District was a segregated district; that issue was not in question. The Code of West Virginia in effect at the time mandated that [w]hite and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school.' In 1896, only two years prior to the West Virginia Supreme Court's decision in the Williams case, the United States Supreme Court had upheld racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson.2 There Justice Henry Billings Brown, speak- ing for the majority, wrote that [l]aws permitting, and even re- quiring, [race] separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of ei- ther race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the state legislatures in the exercise of their police power.3 However, the West Virginia law did require the trustees of every sub-district to establish therein one or more primary schools for colored persons between the ages of six and twenty-one.4 The act further provided that such schools so established shall be * Mark W. Podvia is Associate University Librarian at the West Virginia Uni- versity College of Law Library. 'W. Va. Code Chap. §17 (1891). 2 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 3 Id. at 544. 4 W. Va. Code Chap. §17 (1891). 2015

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