In 1909, Dr. H. A. Edwards tragically shot and killed John Kirby, father of eight. John’s widow, Annie, died the following year. The surviving orphans moved in with their maternal aunt and uncle, Sarah and George Tucker. The Tuckers enrolled the three eldest boys, Dudley, Eugene, and Herbert, in a local white public school called Dalcho School. They did well there for two years. During their third year, Dr. Edwards’ brother, Sam, circulated a petition seeking to bar any nonwhite students from attending Dalcho School. Though the Kirby children had always lived as white, Edwards stoked concerns over John Kirby’s Native American lineage. John had been less than 1/8th Croatan. Edwards gathered signatures and stirred up alarm with other white parents. Though he claimed to not be targeting the Kirby children, his actions quickly and directly impacted them. The school’s Board of Trustees yielded to the pressure and expelled the boys. Their uncle and guardian, George Tucker, a prominent white farmer, protested. During the Board hearings, the focus turned mostly to whether the children were “pure white.” Community concerns about their racial identity took priority despite South Carolina’s State Constitution saying that people should be considered white if they had less than 1/8th “colored blood.” After losing appeals to the local and state Boards of Education, George took his next appeal directly to the South Carolina Supreme Court. Chief Justice Gary concluded that even though the Kirby children were technically white per the state’s law, the school board was justified in expelling them because of their community’s concerns. Beyond the impact on the Kirby children, this ruling moved South Carolina away from the 1/8th rule and toward the “one drop” rule used elsewhere in the U.S. South. This rule suggested that a person with any nonwhite heritage was not white. Further, Justice Gary referred to the Kirby children’s “negro blood” in his ruling, perhaps to be in line with the wording of the existing arguments and laws he cited to justify his decision. Unfortunately, because of this wording, some future legal arguments that referred to this case did so with the assumption the Kirby children were part-Black, further obscuring their Croatan heritage and overlooking any related, nuanced implications. [368 words]