In the spring of 1831, Ohio legislators passed a new poor law that banned African Americans from ever gaining a legal settlement in the state—that is, it made them ineligible for poor relief should they become needy, and, in a more abstract sense, declared that they were perpetual outsiders to the state’s community. The legislature also passed a comprehensive law that established public education in the state but provided that public schools were “for the instruction of the white youth of every class and grade, without distinction.”
