William Cooper Nell: the Boston organiser who ended school segregation

"No man in New England has performed more uncompensated labor for humanity, and especially for his own race, than William C. Nell," wrote the abolitionist William Wells Brown. Nell's life ran through a single short street on Boston's Beacon Hill, Smith Court: he went to school there, organised there, sheltered fugitives from slavery there, and wrote there one of the first books of African American history. He led the fifteen-year campaign that ended segregated schools in Boston.

A boy on Beacon Hill

Nell was born on December 16, 1816, into Boston's free Black community, a few streets from Smith Court, and grew up among activists.

• His mother, Louisa, belonged to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, whose yearly bazaars raised money for the American Anti-Slavery Society.
• His father, William Guion Nell, co-founded and was vice-president of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, formed at the African Meeting House in 1826 to fight slavery and discrimination nationwide. He petitioned Congress, pushed Massachusetts to repeal its discriminatory laws and wrote for Freedom's Journal, one of the first Black newspapers.
• A family friend was David Walker, author of the fiery Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.

In January 1832 the boy watched through a vestry window of the Belknap Street church as William Lloyd Garrison, editor of The Liberator, and a few others founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, with his father's association looking on. Soon after, Nell helped start the Juvenile Garrison Independent Society, the first antislavery organisation of young people in Boston.

The Liberator's notice of the society's meeting on October 16, 1833.

At that meeting, aged sixteen, Nell set out the beliefs he would act on for forty years. "Prejudice is the cause of slavery," he said, and the cure was unity: young Black men should help one another and "renovate the minds of the public in defence of their national rights and liberties" until the oppressed could say, "WE ARE FREE!!" As a teenager he became Garrison's apprentice at The Liberator, learning printing and journalism, and he wrote for it through its whole run — apart from a spell in Rochester, New York, working with Frederick Douglass on The North Star.

The fight for equal schools

Nell had felt prejudice early. Barred from the better-funded neighbourhood schools, he attended the segregated school for Black children on the ground floor of the African Meeting House. He was among the top students, but the awards dinner at Faneuil Hall was for white students only. So Nell talked a Black waiter into letting him work the dinner in his place, and there confronted a school official, who could not explain the exclusion. Nell vowed, "God willing, I will do my best to hasten the day when the color of the skin will be no barrier to equal school rights."

The Abiel Smith School, 1849. The Boston Almanac

The Black school later moved next door into its own building, the Abiel Smith School. As an adult Nell led nearly fifteen years of protests, boycotts and petitions to close it, co-founding the School Abolishing Party in the mid-1840s. The campaign met resistance from many white Bostonians and from some Black Bostonians who wanted strong separate schools instead; one meeting at the African Meeting House ended with stones thrown, which Nell kept as "trophies of the struggle."

In 1855 the Massachusetts legislature desegregated the state's public schools — the result of seven petitions, two lawsuits, a major boycott and countless articles, speeches and meetings, most of which Nell took part in or organised. A legislator who backed the law said Nell had "furnished all the materials and capitol" for it. On December 17, 1855, the community honoured him at the Twelfth Baptist Church, one of the few times he stood in the spotlight; historians of Black Boston count him among the grassroots organisers who did the unglamorous work of keeping a community in motion. The day before the new term, Nell watched a Black boy walk past the Smith School: "Good bye forever colored school! Tomorrow we are like the other Boston boys."

The Underground Railroad

In the early 1840s Nell joined the New England Freedom Association, a Black group meeting at the African Meeting House to "hide the outcast" from slave catchers. After the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, he became one of the most active members of the interracial Boston Vigilance Committee, raising money and sheltering fugitives in his own home at 3 Smith Court.

He was a Garrisonian pacifist, yet he told Black Bostonians to defend themselves against slave catchers as they would against "any wild beast." At a mass meeting at the African Meeting House he invoked Crispus Attucks and Boston's revolution: resisting the law, he argued, was not disloyalty to American ideals but the defence of them.

A historian with a purpose

At 3 Smith Court Nell finished The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855), making him the first published Black historian in the United States. He believed telling Black Americans' contributions — military service above all — would show their worth to everyone, build pride, and advance the case for freedom and citizenship. He ended the book with a charge to remember those whom others neglected, "that the stars which shone in our horizon have ushered in a glorious dawn."

Nell died in 1874. His memorial service was held at the African Meeting House on Smith Court, where so much of his life had happened.

Sources

Written from "William Cooper Nell: Smith Court Leader," Boston African American National Historic Site, National Park Service, first published on the Smith Court Stories digital classroom; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It draws on William Cooper Nell: Selected Writings 1832–1874 (Wesley and Uzelac, 2002), Stephen Kantrowitz's More Than Freedom (2012), James and Lois Horton's Black Bostonians (1979) and Nell's own Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855).