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Boston African American National Historic SitePage 66 of 70

The Black Struggle for Equal Education in Boston, 1787 to 1976

A park brochure turned on its side, with a blue center panel reading Desegregation in the Cradle of Liberty and a subtitle on a gold band about the struggle for equal education in Boston

A remix of Boston National Historical Park's original 1976 brochure. NPS illustration by E Hanson Plass.

Boston calls itself the "Cradle of Liberty" for nurturing the revolutionary ideals the country was founded on, and education was among them. Bostonians founded the oldest public school in America, the Boston Latin School, in 1635, and the city is still known as a center of learning. That reputation tells only part of the story. From 1787 on, generation after generation of Black Bostonians fought for the right to an equal education, leaving a legacy of advocacy, community organizing and lawsuits that the National Park Service describes as a different kind of Freedom Trail: much of the same ground, but a history running from 1787 to 1976.

1787–1855: Petitions, a school of their own, and a new law

In the 1780s no law kept Black children out of Boston's schools, but those who went faced hostile teachers and classmates. In 1787 Prince Hall and others petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for better schooling, writing that Black children:

"receive no benefit from the free schools in the town of Boston, which we think is a great grievance, as by woful experience we now feel the want of a common education."

That petition failed, and so did another in 1796. The community responded by founding its own private school. The "African School" met in 1798 in the home of Prince Hall's son, Primus Hall; by 1808 it had moved to the basement of the African Meeting House, and in the mid-1830s to the Abiel Smith School.

The Smith School was officially part of the city system but got far fewer resources, relied on donations, and became the default school for most of Boston's Black students. It became the focus of the fight to desegregate the city's schools. Activists including William Cooper Nell organized boycotts and petition drives against it. In the late 1840s Benjamin Roberts sued the city on behalf of his young daughter, Sarah. The family lost Roberts v. City of Boston, but the community pressed on, and in 1855 the Massachusetts legislature outlawed segregated public schools.

1890s–1960s: A divided city

As Boston grew in population and size and new immigrant groups arrived in large numbers, distinct ethnic neighborhoods formed, each competing for good schools. By the mid-1900s those neighborhoods had hardened, and race-based housing policies such as redlining had produced a segregated city. Segregation reached the schools too, despite federal and state laws against it.

The gaps between neighborhoods were stark. Wealthy and middle-class areas had newer, better-kept buildings, permanent teachers and room for every student. Schools in white working-class neighborhoods such as Charlestown and South Boston were not as good, but generally fared better than those in Black neighborhoods such as Roxbury. South Boston used its political influence in the early 1900s to win its own high school, and Charlestown organized during urban renewal in the 1960s to get new schools built. The Black community's calls for better schools kept being set aside, and by the 1960s and 1970s the issue had reached a boiling point.

1950s–1974: The movement and the court

In the 1950s the Black community, and mothers in particular, began organizing against unequal schools. In 1963 the local branch of the NAACP took up desegregation, led by the activist Ruth Batson. Over the next few years it documented segregation in the Boston Public Schools that persisted despite the 1855 state law and the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

When the Boston School Committee kept obstructing that work and refused to admit the schools were segregated, the NAACP sued. In Morgan v. Hennigan, the U.S. District Court ruled in 1974 that the committee had deliberately created and kept up separate schools by race. To bring the city into line with federal and state law, Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered integration through what became known as "forced busing": Black children were bused to schools in white neighborhoods such as South Boston and Charlestown, and white children to schools in Black neighborhoods such as Roxbury. The order set off fierce backlash from white residents and years of racial violence.

The 1960s and 1970s: Protest on historic ground

Many of the battles before and after Garrity's ruling played out at places that are now part of the National Parks of Boston, turning Freedom Trail landmarks into battlegrounds again. They include the Old State House, Faneuil Hall, the Bunker Hill Monument, Dorchester Heights and the Robert Gould Shaw/54th Regiment Memorial:

  • the Robert Gould Shaw/54th Regiment Memorial, where activists rallied during the 20th-century Black education movement;
  • downtown Boston and Faneuil Hall, where activists rallied and protested for desegregation in the 1970s;
  • the Bunker Hill Monument, where Charlestown parents protested in the streets when busing arrived in 1975;
  • Dorchester Heights, which shares a hill with South Boston High School and became a site of unrest during the busing crisis.

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