Roberts v. City of Boston: A Five-Year-Old's Case Against School Segregation

Originally published on Smith Court Stories, a digital classroom, and shared by Boston African American National Historic Site.

A neglected school

Within ten years of opening at 46 Belknap Street (now Joy Street), Boston's Abiel Smith School, the city's school for Black children, had fallen into disrepair. An 1846 city report described rooms that were too small, defaced paint, "the most shameful negligence and abuse," no recitation rooms or places for coats, and yards about fifteen feet square reachable only through a dark, damp cellar.

Boston's African American community had first supported a Black school for its children, but the inequality of segregated schooling soon became plain. Petitions in 1844, 1845 and 1846 urged the Primary School Committee to desegregate the primary and grammar schools. All failed.

The 1846 petition, signed by more than 80 members of the community. From the Report to the Primary School Committee.

The 1846 petitioners wrote that separate schools were "a great injury to us," denying Black children the equal privileges they were entitled to as citizens, and that "these separate schools cost more and do less for the children than other schools." They called segregation "unlawful" and asked that such schools be abolished.

The committee's majority refused, in openly racist terms, claiming Black children's "peculiar physical, mental, and moral structure" required different treatment. It added that if the petitioners thought the ruling unjust, "the law is open," and they could seek redress in the courts. One of them soon did.

Sarah Roberts's walk

In 1847 Benjamin Roberts, a Boston printer, asked the committee to let his five-year-old daughter, Sarah, attend the school for white children near their home on Andover Street. He was refused four times; she could go to the Black school instead. To reach the Smith School, the nearest one for Black children, Sarah had to walk past five schools for white children.

In 1848 Roberts enrolled her at the nearby school anyway. When she was expelled, he sued the city under an 1845 state law that let any child unlawfully excluded from public school instruction recover damages from the city or town that ran the school.

Morris and Sumner

Roberts hired Robert Morris, one of the first African American men admitted to the bar in Massachusetts. According to historians Paul and Stephen Kendrick, Morris shaped the case's first arguments, applying the 1845 law to Sarah's situation. He brought in a young Charles Sumner, later an abolitionist U.S. senator from Massachusetts, as co-counsel to tie Sarah's case to the larger fight for equal schools.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard the case on November 1, 1849. Sumner reminded the judges that the state constitution declares all men "without distinction of color or race, are equal before the law," and argued:

The legislation of Massachusetts has made no discrimination of color or race in the establishment of the public schools.

Segregation by race, he said, "is a violation of equality," and the committee had no power to assign children to schools by race. He closed on the harm it did:

The separation of the schools, so far from being for the benefit of both races, is an injury to both. It tends to create a feeling of degradation in the blacks, and of prejudice and uncharitableness in the whites.

The ruling

Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled for the city. He accepted the principle of equality before the law but held that it did not mean everyone had the same rights in every setting; those rights, he wrote, "must depend on laws adapted to their respective relations and conditions." The committee had the power to assign children to schools, and Shaw backed its judgment that separate primary schools served "the good of both classes."

The decision became a precedent for the "separate but equal" doctrine later used in cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which helped entrench Jim Crow segregation across the country.

Victory in 1855

The ruling was a heavy blow to Boston's equal schools movement, but African Americans and their allies kept working. Thanks to activists including William C. Nell, the Massachusetts legislature outlawed segregation in public schools in 1855, a widely celebrated victory.

Sources

• National Park Service, Boston African American National Historic Site, "The Sarah Roberts Case": https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-sarah-roberts-case.htm
• Sarah C. Roberts v. City of Boston, 59 Mass. 198, 5 Cush. 198: https://cite.case.law/mass/59/198/?full_case=true&format=html
• The article draws on Levy and Philips, "The Roberts Case: Source of the 'Separate but Equal' Doctrine," American Historical Review 56(3), 1951; Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians (1999); Ficker, "From Roberts to Plessy," Journal of Negro History 84(4), 1999; Kendrick and Kendrick, Sarah's Long Walk (2004); and Jacobs, Journal of Negro Education 39(1), 1970.
• The article dates Shaw's ruling to 1850, while the case citation it gives carries the year 1849; this page gives no year for the ruling.
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.