## Facts

- Stephen Girard’s will created Girard College as an “Orphan Establishment” limited to “poor male white orphans.”
- The City of Philadelphia, acting through the Board of Directors of City Trusts, served as trustee administering the college.
- William Ashe Foust and Robert Felder, poor Black male orphans, sought admission but were denied under the will’s racial limitation.
- The Pennsylvania courts initially enforced the racial restriction while the City served as trustee.
- The United States Supreme Court reversed, holding the Board was a state agency and its race-based exclusion violated the Fourteenth Amendment; the case was remanded for further proceedings consistent with that decision.
- On remand, the Orphans’ Court dismissed the applicants’ admission petitions, removed the City/Board as trustee effective upon appointment of substitutes, appointed private trustees, and directed an accounting.
- The City, the Commonwealth, and the applicants appealed the Orphans’ Court’s final decrees to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

## Issues

1. Whether the Orphans’ Court’s removal of the public trustee and appointment of private trustees, while retaining the will’s racial admissions term, complied with the federal mandate condemning unconstitutional “state action.”
2. Whether the remand required the applicants’ admission to Girard College, rather than a change in trust administration eliminating state involvement.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirmed the Orphans’ Court decrees.
- The court held that the federal decision barred discriminatory administration by a state agency but did not require rewriting the trust’s substantive admissions condition.
- The court concluded that substituting private trustees eliminated unconstitutional state action and was not inconsistent with the federal mandate.
- Costs were assessed against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia.

## Legal Principles

- A federal mandate addressing unconstitutional discrimination by a state actor may be satisfied by removing the state actor from administration when the remedy is consistent with state trust-administration authority.
- Courts may treat a testator’s expressed conditions as controlling and, where feasible, prefer administrative changes (e.g., trustee substitution) over altering dispositive terms to effectuate testamentary intent.
- The Fourteenth Amendment constrains discriminatory conduct attributable to state action; private administration of a private trust, without state involvement, was treated as outside that constraint under the doctrine applied.

## Conclusion

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court held that replacing the City and its board with private trustees was a permissible response to the federal ruling because it removed state action while preserving the will’s race-based admissions restriction, and it therefore affirmed the decrees dismissing the applicants’ admission petitions and restructuring the trusteeship.


In re Girard College Trusteeship, 391 Pa. 434, 138 A.2d 844 (Pa. 1958)