This year marks the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Nevada’s version of Brown v. Board of Education. A Nevada Supreme Court decision ended racial segregation in Nevada schools … and eventually had no real impact on segregation at all. You heard that right.
After Nevada became a state, legislators passed a law stating that “Negroes, Mongolians and Indians shall not be admitted into the public schools, but the board of trustees may establish a separate school for their education, and use the public school funds for the support of the same.”
By 1870, the census showed only three Black children of school age had gone to school the previous year… and in three different counties. Obviously, they had not built a school for one child. A Eureka resident wrote that “no children are admitted except those who wear white skins.”
In Carson City, local African Americans had tried to raise money to build a school. But they didn’t have enough. Some state officials criticized the school segregation law. But in Carson City, the school board unanimously opposed admitting African American children to public schools. Nathan Stoutmeyer, a laborer, had a seven-year-old son David who had applied to attend a public school. The trustees refused. Stoutmeyer hired attorney T.W.W. Davies, who filed a brief to the Nevada Supreme Court. He came at the trustees from every direction. He pointed out that the state doled out public school funds according to the number of children, with no reference to their color. Therefore, he said, all of the children should benefit. Davies argued that the law was unconstitutional under multiple clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment and civil rights laws that Congress passed in 1866 and 1870. In language that was reminiscent of Earl Warren’s opinion in the Brown case, Davies wrote that “although the instruction in the public schools and these separate schools may be precisely the same, a school exclusively devoted to one class must differ essentially, in its spirit and character, from that public school… where all classes meet together in equality.” And, he said, “it tends to create a feeling of degradation in the blacks, and of prejudice and uncharitableness in the whites.” He said that since Black parents paid the same taxes as white parents, this was taxation without representation.
Stoutmeyer and Davies won their case, two to one. Justice B.C. Whitman wrote, “if the constitution provides anything… it provides for the education of all children of the state.” He said that separate schools were acceptable if they were equal. Chief Justice James Lewis concurred, adding that “the legislature has no more right to designate a class by the color of the skin, than by the color of the hair.” The dissenting justice, John Garber, wanted to uphold segregated schools because he believed in segregation.
The 1873 legislature went along with the majority and repealed the offending statute. It isn’t clear how much of it was enlightenment and how much was Nevadans realizing they couldn’t afford separate but equal schools. Unfortunately, as Nevada grew, residential segregation meant that as long as kids went to neighborhood schools, there would be school segregation. But in 1872, the Nevada Supreme Court took a stand for what was right.