The Struggle for Equal Education in Boston: From the African School to the Smith School

“Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.”
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— Horace Mann, 1848

Many Americans see education as a force for equality and citizenship, and Boston seems to embody that tradition: Puritan settlers founded Boston Latin School in 1635 and Harvard College in 1636. But the question of who could get a good education complicates the reformer Horace Mann’s famous claim — nowhere more than in Boston’s own history.

Barriers to school

In the early 1800s Boston did not require children to attend its grammar and writing schools. Poor families generally could not afford the private schooling needed to be admitted to the public schools, and many sent their children to work instead. For Black families the obstacles were greater still.

Massachusetts abolished slavery gradually in the 1780s, ending an institution that had enslaved thousands of people of African and Indigenous descent for some 150 years. Seeking work, housing and stability, more African American families settled in Boston in the 1790s and early 1800s. No law barred Black children from school, but the economic legacy of slavery and white Bostonians’ prejudice made attending hard.

The African School

The Black leader Primus Hall answered by starting an “African School” in his own home in 1798, funded by donations from wealthy white benefactors and by fees from the families who sent their children. A yellow fever outbreak soon closed it. It reopened in a former carpenter’s shop near Smith Court, and in 1808 moved into the basement of the African Meeting House. After continued activism and petitioning, it finally received public funds in 1812.

Most Black families, earning low wages in unskilled and service work, struggled to pay the fees, so the school depended on white supporters. The most important was the merchant Abiel Smith, who helped pay for the move to the Meeting House, the school’s furnishings and its teacher. When he died in 1815, his will left stocks and bonds for “the maintenance & support of a school or schools…for the instruction of people of color.” By 1818 his fund was repairing the schoolroom, buying textbooks, paying teachers and assistants, supplying firewood, and helping rent a room for children in the North End.

In 1822 a primary school for children aged four to seven opened in a neighboring basement room. Boston’s public primary schools had opened to families only in 1818, after a citywide campaign, and funding seems to have delayed the one for Black children. Throughout, most of the organizing, petitioning and activism came from the Black community itself, with help from a few white supporters; the city paid teachers’ salaries, but improvements and supplies came from the community or the Smith fund.

“Invidious and unjust”

By the 1830s the basement’s shortcomings were plain. The 1833 School Committee report called the space “low and confined,” overcrowded with a grammar school and a primary school serving children from four to their teens, “hot and stifled in the summer and cold in the winter.” But its greatest objection, it said, was the “obvious contrast between the accommodations of the coloured, and other children,” which kept attendance low — a distinction the committee called “both as invidious and unjust.”

The Abiel Smith School

In 1834 the city bought land beside the Meeting House, and on March 3, 1835, a new schoolhouse opened at the corner of today’s Joy Street and Smith Court. Named the Abiel Smith School for the early benefactor, it was Boston’s first schoolhouse built for the education of Black children, and a ceremony marked the students’ move from the basement next door.

The Smith School in the 1849 Boston Almanac.

The new school recognized Black children’s educational needs — and also set segregation in brick and mortar. As Boston’s Black population grew in the 1830s and ’40s the school quickly became overcrowded. Just three years after it opened, Primus Hall and others petitioned without success to add a story. By 1845 a report called it “not only in an unsatisfactory, but in a deplorable condition.” Parents and community leaders carried the fight for equal education forward through petitions, court cases, boycotts and calls for new laws — led by William Cooper Nell, a graduate of the African School, whose campaigns argued that segregated schools harmed Black children.

Sources

Based on "The Struggle for Equal Education," Boston African American National Historic Site, National Park Service, first published on the digital classroom Smith Court Stories; rewritten in hubnx’s own words. Quotations are from Horace Mann’s 1848 annual report, Abiel Smith’s will, and Boston school committee reports of 1833 and 1845.