“North Carolina has a law that white and Negro children shall not attend the same schools, but that separate schools shall be maintained. If the terms for all the public schools in the State are equal in length, if the teaching force is equal in numbers and ability, if the school buildings are equal… then race distinction exists but not a discrimination….
“If scientific investigation and experience show that in the education of the Negro child emphasis should be placed on one course of study, and in the education of the white child, on another, [then] it is not a discrimination to emphasize industrial training in the Negro school and classics in the white school. There is no discrimination so long as there is equality of opportunity….”
— From “Race Distinctions in American Law” by Gilbert Thomas Stephenson (1910)
“Separate but equal” had been approved in Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) and would remain the law of the land until Brown vs. Board of Education (1954).