"The law recognizes racial instinct": Tucker v. Blease and the Black-White Paradigm in the Jim Crow South

On January 24, 1913, the trustees of the Dalcho School, a segregated, all-white public school in Dillon County, South Carolina, summarily dismissed Dudley, Eugene, and Herbert Kirby, ages ten, twelve, and fourteen, respectively. According to testimony offered in a subsequent hearing, the boys had ?always properly behaved, were ?good pupils,and ?never ?exercise[d] any bad influence in school.Moreover, the boysoverwhelmingly white ancestry, in the words of the South Carolina Supreme Court, technically ?entitled [them] to be classified as white,according to state law. Nevertheless, because local whites believed that the Kirbys were ?not of pure Caucasian blood,and that therefore their removal was in the segregated school's best interest, the court, in Tucker v. Blease (1914), upheld their expulsion. © 2011 the American Society for Legal History, Inc.