John I. Gaines, an intelligent and fearless Colored leader, made a statement of the case to a public meeting of the Colored people of Cincinnati, and urged the employment of counsel to try the case in the courts. Money was raised, and Flamen Ball, Sr., was secured to make an application for _mandamus_. The case was finally carried to the Supreme Court and won by the Colored people.
In 1851, the schools were opened again; but the rooms were small and wretchedly appointed, and the trustees unable to provide better ones. Without notice the Colored trustees were deposed. The management of the Colored schools was vested in a board of trustees and school visitors, who were also in charge of the schools for the white children. This board, under a new law, had authority to appoint six Colored men who were to manage the Colored schools with the exception of the school fund. This greatly angered the leading Colored men, and, therefore, they refused to endorse this new management.
The law was altered in 1856, giving the Colored people the right to elect, by ballot, their own trustees.
In 1858, Nicholas Longworth built the first school-house for the Colored people, and gave them the building on a lease of fourteen years, in which time they were to pay for it--$14,000. In 1859, a large building was erected on Court Street.
Oberlin College opened its doors to Colored students from the moment of its existence in 1833, and they have never been closed at any time since. It was here that the incomparable Finney, with the fierceness of John Baptist, the gentleness of John the Evangelist, the logic of Paul, and the eloquence of Isaiah, pleaded the cause of the American slave, and gave instruction to all who sat at his feet regardless of color or race. George B. Vashon, William Howard Day, John Mercer Langston, and many other Colored men graduated from Oberlin College before any of the other leading colleges of the country had consented to give Colored men a classical education.
Anthony Benezet established, in 1750, the first school for Colored people in this State, and taught it himself without money and without price. He solicited funds for the erection of a school-house for the Colored children, and of their intellectual capacities said: "I can with truth and sincerity declare that I have found among the negroes as great variety of talents as among a like number of whites, and I am bold to assert that the notion entertained by some, that the blacks are inferior in their capacity, is a vulgar prejudice, founded on the pride or ignorance of their lordly masters, who have kept their slaves at such a distance as to be unable to form a right judgment of them."