Mr. Farmer's children were denied admission to the local white school because the school considered them to be Black. Mr. Farmer sued the school board of Mobile County and asked the court to require his children to be admitted because he considered his children to be white. The lawsuit was taken all the way to the Alabama Supreme Court. The question before the court was whether the Farmer children were Black or white. The court concluded that no child with an "appreciable" amount of Black blood would be admitted to a public school for white children. They found that the Farmer children possessed “an appreciable amount” of Black blood and could not attend the white school. To the court, appearance did not matter as much as ancestry. This idea was casually known as the “one-drop rule,” which suggested that people with even “one drop” of blood from a Black ancestor were legally considered Black and thus able to be denied the privileges available to white people.