Kentucky Day Law and Berea College

The Day Law, "An Act to Prohibit White and Colored Persons from Attending the Same School," was signed into law in the Commonwealth of Kentucky by Governor J.C.W. Beckham in March 1904. The law effectively forced Berea College, the only integrated college in Kentucky, to segregate. As the bill was being debated in the Kentucky House of Representatives Committee on Education, two groups came to Frankfort to lobby the legislators. One group was led by Berea College President William G. Frost and his wife to protest the bill while the other group was led by Berea's Democrat Club president, J.M. Early, to speak in support of the bill. State Superintendent of Education Harry McChesney also spoke in favor of the bill. Berea College was criminally convicted and fined $1,000 for failure to segregate. The Court of Appeals of Kentucky denied Berea College's appeal, agreeing with the Kentucky General Assembly on the law's purpose, that of preventing racial violence and interracial marriage. In 1908, the US Supreme Court affirmed the legitimacy of Commonwealth's right to prohibit individuals and corporations from operating integrated schools. The decision in Berea College v. Kentucky extended the 1896 opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson to include colleges and universities specifically on the grounds that they were charted by the state. The Kentucky Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, as he had done with Plessy v. Ferguson, as he thought that it was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause and was a governmental intrusion on citizens' private lives. The Supreme Court, fifty years later, took a position similar to Justice Harlan in its ruling on Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka. The Day Law became illegal upon the Supreme Court's decision in 1954 in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka.  However, Berea College began to reintegrate in 1950.