“The cause of equal school privileges or iginated with us. Unaided and unbiased we commenced the struggle.”
– Benjamin Robert on efforts to desegregate Boston schools
”In 1954 the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision struck down segregation in public schools. The prior legal doctrine allowing “separate but equal” schools originated with the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts.
Sarah and Benjamin Roberts
Benjamin Robert’s daughter Sarah was forced to walk a longer distance to a segregated school. Her maternal grandfather James Easton was a Revolutionary War veteran who tried to integrate his local church. After buying a pew, he found it covered with tar the following week. Benjamin Roberts published a newspaper for a time and ran a printing business. He brought suit to desegregate Boston public schools. Some black parents disagreed, thinking that a segregated school was safer.
Charles L. Remond . . .
Several black activists were related to the Roberts family, including Charles Lenox Remond of Salem. A dynamic speaker, he may have been the first African-American to testify before a Massachusetts legislative committee (examining railroad discrimination in 1842.)
The Abiel Smith . . .
A wealthy philanthropist, Abiel Smith, had donated money to establish a school for black children. By 1848 it had fallen behind other Boston Public Schools by almost every measure. The Mather School library had nine hundred volumes, the Mayhew School four hundred, while the Smith School had one.
- Massachusetts Archives
The Roberts . . .
The Roberts case was heard in the same courthouse that was later the scene of dramatic and violent protests against the return of fugitive slaves during the 1850’s.
- Boston Athenaeum
Lemuel Shaw . . .
Domineering and austere, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Supreme Judicial Court was not moved by moral arguments against segregation
- Massachusetts Archives
Senator Charles Sumner
- Social Law Library
Roberts approached black attorney William Morris to handle the case. Morris joined with another young attorney, the future Senator Charles Sumner, in representing the Roberts family.
The Roberts Decision
The doctrine of “separate but equal” was born in Massachusetts. In 1849 the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that separate schools, if equal, did not violate the principle of “equality before the law.” The decision was cited to justify segregation in later cases in Nevada, California, New York, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Oregon, and West Virginia. It became entrenched in national law when followed by the U. S. Supreme Court in the case of “Plessy v. Ferguson” that upheld segregation in New Orleans in 1896.
