By Justice Larry V. Starcher

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court pronounced its “separate but equal” doctrine in the now famous case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Earlier in the same year, our West Virginia Court decided the case of Martin v. Board of Education of Morgan County.

In the Martin case, Morgan County, West Virginia, did not have a “colored school.” Thomas Martin, a black parent, wanted his children to have an education, so he requested that they be permitted to attend the local white school. He was refused. The lawyer who represented Thomas Martin and his children was J.R. Clifford. In Martin, Clifford argued before the West Virginia Supreme Court that “because the legislature and the board of education had failed to make proper provision to afford equal facilities to colored children, that they are entitled to attend the school provided for white children, on equal terms.” Martin was the first case in West Virginia and one of the earliest in the Nation to attack segregated schools as unconstitutional.

Sadly but not surprisingly, Thomas Martin lost his case. In Martin, our West Virginia Court held that “the [West Virginia] constitution . . . which provides that ‘white and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school,’ is not repugnant to …the fourteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States.” Our Court went on to say: “This question has already been settled by numerous decisions of state and federal courts.”
But while our Court sustained the plain language of our State Constitution, it was not quite so harsh as Plessy was to be a few months later. In its 1896 decision our Court also said that: “Such a determination [i.e. to force a white school to take black children] would be, in effect, permitting the neglect of the legislature or board of education to abrogate the constitution, while it is the paramount duty of this court to see that they obey it.” And obey they did. Shortly after the Martin decision, Morgan County established a “colored school.”
Still, the 1896 Martin decision by the West Virginia Supreme Court and the Plessy decision by the U.S. Supreme Court established “separate but equal” as the law of the land with respect to school attendance – for a half-century plus – until Brown V. Board of Education in 1954. But just two years after the Martin case, in 1898, the West Virginia Supreme Court released another opinion, authored by the same judge who authored the Martin opinion, Judge Marmaduke Dent. The case was Carrie Williams v. Board of Education of Fairfax District, this time a win for J.R. Clifford and his client, and an important victory for civil rights in West Virginia and the nation.