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Sarah's Long Walk: The Free Blacks Of Boston And How Their Struggle For Equality Changed America
The never-before-told story of the African-American child who started the fight for desegregation in America's public schools
One fall day in 1848, on windswept Beacon Hill in Boston, a five-year-old girl named Sarah Roberts walked past five white schools to attend the poor and densely crowded all-black Abiel Smith School. Incensed that his daughter had been turned away at each white school, Benjamin Roberts resolved to sue the city of Boston on her behalf.
Thus began what would be a more than one-hundred-year struggle that culminated in 1954 with the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate America's schools. Today, few have heard of the Roberts case or of the black abolitionist printer whose love for his daughter started it all, but now, with Sarah's Long Walk, readers can learn about one black community's heroic struggle for equality.
Sarah's Long Walk recovers the stories of white and black Boston; of Beacon Hill in the nineteenth century; of twenty-four-year-old Robert Morris, the black lawyer who tried the case; and of all the people who participated in this early struggle to desegregate Boston's schools.
Stephen Kendrick and his son, Paul, have told Sarah's story—previously a mere footnote in the history books—with color and imagination, bringing out the human side of this very important struggle. Sarah's Long Walk is popular history at its best.
One fall day in 1848, on windswept Beacon Hill in Boston, a five-year-old girl named Sarah Roberts walked past five white schools to attend the poor and densely crowded all-black Abiel Smith School. Incensed that his daughter had been turned away at each white school, Benjamin Roberts resolved to sue the city of Boston on her behalf.
Thus began what would be a more than one-hundred-year struggle that culminated in 1954 with the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate America's schools. Today, few have heard of the Roberts case or of the black abolitionist printer whose love for his daughter started it all, but now, with Sarah's Long Walk, readers can learn about one black community's heroic struggle for equality.
Sarah's Long Walk recovers the stories of white and black Boston; of Beacon Hill in the nineteenth century; of twenty-four-year-old Robert Morris, the black lawyer who tried the case; and of all the people who participated in this early struggle to desegregate Boston's schools.
Stephen Kendrick and his son, Paul, have told Sarah's story—previously a mere footnote in the history books—with color and imagination, bringing out the human side of this very important struggle. Sarah's Long Walk is popular history at its best.
300 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
3 people are currently reading
108 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Kendrick
91 books231 followersStephen Kendrick (born June 10, 1974) is an American film writer and producer, co-writer of the book The Love Dare with brother Alex Kendrick, and former senior associate pastor at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. Stephen, Shannon and Alex Kendrick comprise Kendrick Brothers Productions.
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February 20, 2022
Review of: Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America, by Stephen Kendrick & Paul Kendrick
by Stan Prager (2-20-22)
Several years ago, I published an article in a scholarly journal entitled “Strange Bedfellows: Nativism, Know-Nothings, African-Americans & School Desegregation in Antebellum Massachusetts,” that spotlighted the odd confluence of anti-Irish nativism and the struggle to desegregate Boston schools. The Know-Nothings—a populist, nativist coalition that contained elements that would later be folded into the emerging Republican Party—made a surprising sweep in the Massachusetts 1854 elections, fueled primarily by anti-Irish sentiment, as well as a pent-up popular rage against the elite status quo that had long dominated state politics. Suddenly, the governor, all forty senators, and all but three house representatives were Know-Nothings!
Perhaps more startling was that during their brief tenure, the Know-Nothing legislature enacted a host of progressive reforms, creating laws to protect workingmen, ending imprisonment for debt, strengthening women’s rights in property and marriage, and—most significantly—passing landmark legislation in 1855 that “prohibited the exclusion [from public schools] of children for either racial or religious reasons,” which effectively made Massachusetts the first state in the country to ban segregation in schools! Featured in the debate prior to passage of the desegregation bill is a quote from the record that is to today’s ears perhaps at once comic and cringeworthy, as one proponent of the new law sincerely voiced his regret “that Negroes living on the outskirts . . . were forced to go a long distance to [the segregated] Smith School. . . while . . . the ‘dirtiest Irish,’ were allowed to step from their houses into the nearest school.”
My article focused on Massachusetts politics and the bizarre incongruity of nativists unexpectedly delivering the long sought-after prize of desegregated schools to the African American community. It is also the story of the nearly forgotten black abolitionist and integrationist William Cooper Nell, a mild if charismatic figure who united disparate forces of blacks and whites in a long, stubborn, determined campaign to end Boston school segregation. But there are lots of other important stories of people and events that led to that moment which due to space constraints could not receive adequate treatment in my effort.
Arguably the most significant one, which my article references but does not dwell upon, centers upon a little black girl named Sarah Roberts. Her father, Benjamin R. Roberts, sued for equal protection rights under the state constitution because his daughter was barred from attending a school near her residence and was compelled to a long walk to the rundown and crowded Smith School instead. He was represented by Robert Morris, one of the first African American attorneys in the United States, and Charles Sumner, who would later serve as United States Senator. In April 1850, in Roberts v. The City of Boston, the state Supreme Court ruled against him, declaring that each locality could decide for itself whether to have or end segregation. This ruling was to serve as an unfortunate precedent for the ignominious separate but equal ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson some decades hence and was also an obstacle Thurgood Marshall had to surmount when he successfully argued to have the Supreme Court strike down school segregation across the nation in 1954’s breakthrough Brown v. Board of Education case—just a little more than a century after the disappointing ruling in the Roberts case.
Father and son Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick teamed up to tell the Roberts story and a good deal more in Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America, an extremely well-written, comprehensive, if occasionally slow-moving chronicle that recovers for the reader the vibrant, long overlooked black community that once peopled Boston in the years before the Civil War. In the process, the authors reveal how it was that while the state of Massachusetts offered the best overall quality of life in the nation for free blacks, it was also the home to the same stark, virulent racism characteristic of much of the north in the antebellum era, a deep-seated prejudice that manifested itself not only in segregated schools but also in a strict separation in other arenas such as transportation and theaters.
Doctrines of abolition were widely despised, north and south, and while abolitionists remained a minority in Massachusetts, as well, it was perhaps the only state in the country where antislavery ideology achieved widespread legitimacy. But true history is all nuance, and those who might rail passionately against the inherent evil in holding humans as chattel property did not necessarily also advance notions of racial equality. That was indeed far less common. Moreover, it is too rarely underscored that the majority of northern “Freesoilers” who were later to become the most critical component of the Republican Party vehemently opposed the spread of slavery to the new territories acquired in the Mexican War while concomitantly despising blacks, free or enslaved.
At the same time, there was hardly unanimity in the free black community when it came to integration; some blacks welcomed separation. Still, as Sarah’s Long Walk relates, there were a number of significant African American leaders like Robert Morris and William Cooper Nell whom, with their white abolitionist allies, played the long game and pursued compelling, nonviolent mechanisms to achieve both integration and equality, many of which presaged the tactics of Martin Luther King and other Civil Rights figures a full century later. For instance, rather than lose hope after the Roberts court decision, Nell doubled down his efforts, this time with a new strategy—a taxpayer’s boycott of Boston which saw prominent blacks move out of the city to suburbs that featured integrated schools, depriving Boston of tax revenue.
The Kendrick’s open the narrative with a discussion of Thurgood Marshall’s efforts to overturn the Roberts precedent in Brown v. Board of Education, and then trace that back to the flesh and blood Boston inhabitants who made Roberts v. The City of Boston possible, revealing the free blacks who have too long been lost to history. Readers not familiar with this material will come across much that will surprise them between the covers of this fine book. The most glaring might be how thoroughly in the decades after Reconstruction blacks have been erased from our history, north and south. Until recently, how many growing up in Massachusetts knew anything at all about the thriving free black community in Boston, or similar ones elsewhere above the Mason-Dixon?
But most astonishing for many will be the fact that the separation of races that that would become the new normal in the post-Civil War “Jim Crow” south had its roots fully nurtured in the north decades before Appomattox. Whites and their enslaved chattels shared lives intertwined in the antebellum south, while separation between whites and blacks was fiercely enforced in the north. Many African Americans in Massachusetts had fled bondage, or had family members that were runaways, and knew full well that southern slaveowners commonly traveled by rail accompanied by their enslaved servants, while free blacks in Boston were relegated to a separate car until the state prohibited racial segregation in mass transportation in 1842.
Sarah may not have been spared her long walk to school, but the efforts of integrationists eventually paid off when school segregation was prohibited by Massachusetts law just five years after Sarah’s father lost his case in court. Unfortunately, this battle had to be waged all over again in the 1970s, this time accompanied by episodes of violence, as Boston struggled to achieve educational equality through controversial busing mandates that in the long term generated far more ill will than sustainable results. Despite the elevation of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court bench, and the election of the first African American president, more than one hundred fifty years after the Fourteenth Amendment became the law of the land, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement reminds us that there is still much work to be done to achieve anything like real equality in the United States.
For historians and educators, an even greater concern these days lies in the concerted efforts by some on the political right to erase the true story of African American history from public schools. As this review goes to press in Black History Month, February 2022, shameful acts are becoming law across a number of states that by means of gaslighting legislation ostensibly designed to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT) effectively prohibit educators from teaching their students the true history of slavery, Reconstruction, and Civil Rights. As of this morning, there are some one hundred thirteen other bills being advanced across the nation that could serve as potential gag orders in schools. How can we best combat that? One way is to loudly protest to state and federal officials, to insist that black history is also American history and should not be erased. The other is to freely share black history in your own networks. The best weapons for that in our collective arsenal are quality books like Sarah’s Long Walk.
My journal article, “Strange Bedfellows: Nativism, Know-Nothings, African-Americans & School Desegregation in Antebellum Massachusetts,” and related materials can be accessed here: https://know-nothings.com/
For more about the Know-Nothings, I recommend The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People’s Movement, by John R. Mulkern, which I reviewed here: https://regarp.com/2017/10/05/review-...
Review of: Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America, by Stephen Kendrick & Paul Kendrick https://regarp.com/2022/02/20/review-...
by Stan Prager (2-20-22)
Several years ago, I published an article in a scholarly journal entitled “Strange Bedfellows: Nativism, Know-Nothings, African-Americans & School Desegregation in Antebellum Massachusetts,” that spotlighted the odd confluence of anti-Irish nativism and the struggle to desegregate Boston schools. The Know-Nothings—a populist, nativist coalition that contained elements that would later be folded into the emerging Republican Party—made a surprising sweep in the Massachusetts 1854 elections, fueled primarily by anti-Irish sentiment, as well as a pent-up popular rage against the elite status quo that had long dominated state politics. Suddenly, the governor, all forty senators, and all but three house representatives were Know-Nothings!
Perhaps more startling was that during their brief tenure, the Know-Nothing legislature enacted a host of progressive reforms, creating laws to protect workingmen, ending imprisonment for debt, strengthening women’s rights in property and marriage, and—most significantly—passing landmark legislation in 1855 that “prohibited the exclusion [from public schools] of children for either racial or religious reasons,” which effectively made Massachusetts the first state in the country to ban segregation in schools! Featured in the debate prior to passage of the desegregation bill is a quote from the record that is to today’s ears perhaps at once comic and cringeworthy, as one proponent of the new law sincerely voiced his regret “that Negroes living on the outskirts . . . were forced to go a long distance to [the segregated] Smith School. . . while . . . the ‘dirtiest Irish,’ were allowed to step from their houses into the nearest school.”
My article focused on Massachusetts politics and the bizarre incongruity of nativists unexpectedly delivering the long sought-after prize of desegregated schools to the African American community. It is also the story of the nearly forgotten black abolitionist and integrationist William Cooper Nell, a mild if charismatic figure who united disparate forces of blacks and whites in a long, stubborn, determined campaign to end Boston school segregation. But there are lots of other important stories of people and events that led to that moment which due to space constraints could not receive adequate treatment in my effort.
Arguably the most significant one, which my article references but does not dwell upon, centers upon a little black girl named Sarah Roberts. Her father, Benjamin R. Roberts, sued for equal protection rights under the state constitution because his daughter was barred from attending a school near her residence and was compelled to a long walk to the rundown and crowded Smith School instead. He was represented by Robert Morris, one of the first African American attorneys in the United States, and Charles Sumner, who would later serve as United States Senator. In April 1850, in Roberts v. The City of Boston, the state Supreme Court ruled against him, declaring that each locality could decide for itself whether to have or end segregation. This ruling was to serve as an unfortunate precedent for the ignominious separate but equal ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson some decades hence and was also an obstacle Thurgood Marshall had to surmount when he successfully argued to have the Supreme Court strike down school segregation across the nation in 1954’s breakthrough Brown v. Board of Education case—just a little more than a century after the disappointing ruling in the Roberts case.
Father and son Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick teamed up to tell the Roberts story and a good deal more in Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America, an extremely well-written, comprehensive, if occasionally slow-moving chronicle that recovers for the reader the vibrant, long overlooked black community that once peopled Boston in the years before the Civil War. In the process, the authors reveal how it was that while the state of Massachusetts offered the best overall quality of life in the nation for free blacks, it was also the home to the same stark, virulent racism characteristic of much of the north in the antebellum era, a deep-seated prejudice that manifested itself not only in segregated schools but also in a strict separation in other arenas such as transportation and theaters.
Doctrines of abolition were widely despised, north and south, and while abolitionists remained a minority in Massachusetts, as well, it was perhaps the only state in the country where antislavery ideology achieved widespread legitimacy. But true history is all nuance, and those who might rail passionately against the inherent evil in holding humans as chattel property did not necessarily also advance notions of racial equality. That was indeed far less common. Moreover, it is too rarely underscored that the majority of northern “Freesoilers” who were later to become the most critical component of the Republican Party vehemently opposed the spread of slavery to the new territories acquired in the Mexican War while concomitantly despising blacks, free or enslaved.
At the same time, there was hardly unanimity in the free black community when it came to integration; some blacks welcomed separation. Still, as Sarah’s Long Walk relates, there were a number of significant African American leaders like Robert Morris and William Cooper Nell whom, with their white abolitionist allies, played the long game and pursued compelling, nonviolent mechanisms to achieve both integration and equality, many of which presaged the tactics of Martin Luther King and other Civil Rights figures a full century later. For instance, rather than lose hope after the Roberts court decision, Nell doubled down his efforts, this time with a new strategy—a taxpayer’s boycott of Boston which saw prominent blacks move out of the city to suburbs that featured integrated schools, depriving Boston of tax revenue.
The Kendrick’s open the narrative with a discussion of Thurgood Marshall’s efforts to overturn the Roberts precedent in Brown v. Board of Education, and then trace that back to the flesh and blood Boston inhabitants who made Roberts v. The City of Boston possible, revealing the free blacks who have too long been lost to history. Readers not familiar with this material will come across much that will surprise them between the covers of this fine book. The most glaring might be how thoroughly in the decades after Reconstruction blacks have been erased from our history, north and south. Until recently, how many growing up in Massachusetts knew anything at all about the thriving free black community in Boston, or similar ones elsewhere above the Mason-Dixon?
But most astonishing for many will be the fact that the separation of races that that would become the new normal in the post-Civil War “Jim Crow” south had its roots fully nurtured in the north decades before Appomattox. Whites and their enslaved chattels shared lives intertwined in the antebellum south, while separation between whites and blacks was fiercely enforced in the north. Many African Americans in Massachusetts had fled bondage, or had family members that were runaways, and knew full well that southern slaveowners commonly traveled by rail accompanied by their enslaved servants, while free blacks in Boston were relegated to a separate car until the state prohibited racial segregation in mass transportation in 1842.
Sarah may not have been spared her long walk to school, but the efforts of integrationists eventually paid off when school segregation was prohibited by Massachusetts law just five years after Sarah’s father lost his case in court. Unfortunately, this battle had to be waged all over again in the 1970s, this time accompanied by episodes of violence, as Boston struggled to achieve educational equality through controversial busing mandates that in the long term generated far more ill will than sustainable results. Despite the elevation of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court bench, and the election of the first African American president, more than one hundred fifty years after the Fourteenth Amendment became the law of the land, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement reminds us that there is still much work to be done to achieve anything like real equality in the United States.
For historians and educators, an even greater concern these days lies in the concerted efforts by some on the political right to erase the true story of African American history from public schools. As this review goes to press in Black History Month, February 2022, shameful acts are becoming law across a number of states that by means of gaslighting legislation ostensibly designed to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT) effectively prohibit educators from teaching their students the true history of slavery, Reconstruction, and Civil Rights. As of this morning, there are some one hundred thirteen other bills being advanced across the nation that could serve as potential gag orders in schools. How can we best combat that? One way is to loudly protest to state and federal officials, to insist that black history is also American history and should not be erased. The other is to freely share black history in your own networks. The best weapons for that in our collective arsenal are quality books like Sarah’s Long Walk.
My journal article, “Strange Bedfellows: Nativism, Know-Nothings, African-Americans & School Desegregation in Antebellum Massachusetts,” and related materials can be accessed here: https://know-nothings.com/
For more about the Know-Nothings, I recommend The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People’s Movement, by John R. Mulkern, which I reviewed here: https://regarp.com/2017/10/05/review-...
Review of: Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America, by Stephen Kendrick & Paul Kendrick https://regarp.com/2022/02/20/review-...
September 25, 2019
Not exactly a page-turner, but included some very valuable (and largely ignored) history. My book club agreed that it should be required reading in history classes in this area.
August 2, 2024
I was put off at first by the YAish title and book cover but became absorbed by the legal arguments and strategies attempted a century before Brown v. Board of Education. The pendulum of freedom truly swings back and forth.
Read
July 12, 2021Riveting! Should I put spoiler alerts for a history book? Sometimes I reminded myself during high drama points, "This is all history, these are just facts as they happened," but I also think The Authors Had Choices and chose to amp up the thrill.
Like how they wrung us through the suspense of Robert Morris's trial for rescuing a fugitive slave, even though it seemed pretty clear the jury would acquit. Or how they described Robert Morris's peaceful death after decades of storied activism and a fruitful legal career, and then on the next page revealed the death of his only child Robert Jr. just 2 weeks later.
I liked this narrative style of an engaging storyline and celebrated heroes - Black community leaders and their white abolitionist allies.
I read this book upon learning about Boston's historically Black Beacon Hill neighborhood, from Bettina Love's We Want To Do More Than Survive. Sarah's Long Walk definitely fleshed out a vital period of the history of that community, who in a time when there were still slave states was agitating for equal school rights regardless of race, as well as making a lot of the antiracist and (modern-day) abolitionist teachings of WWTDMTS more concrete - principles like the necessity of civic/political education, mattering, educational survival vs thriving, giving them hell, homeplace, and the constant struggle (and inherent community-building and joy of that exercise) against the forces that undermine civil rights/dark people's freedom - white supremacy and white rage.
Besides that this history ALSO contextualizes today's educational landscape - in this book we see the first legal arguments for and against school integration, and the separatist tensions within the Black community itself. I think that is echoed today as we recognize the importance of HBCUs and some of the problems of PWIs. In the conclusion of Sarah's Long Walk the authors talk about how desegregation is still an issue (book published 2004) and cites magnet programs or remedies for historical redlining as ways forward. Here in 2021 Louisville we have so many public school magnet programs and extensive busing - and the legacy of that implementation of Brown v Board of Ed has been less than stellar in terms of educational outcomes for students of color and their families.
The theme that I was most struck by from this book - for Black abolitionists and their communities, the struggle against slavery and the struggle for civil rights as free(d) people were one and the same. Slaves would escape the South and then in the North not be allowed to work skilled labor trades or have/go to any schools. They were given the outside of cabins to ride on segregated trains, and interracial unions were illegal. What was freedom then? What is freedom now? Now I understand better what abolitionists today are (still) struggling for, and that being free is an active state, an act of participating in democracy and seeking to end injustices.
Like how they wrung us through the suspense of Robert Morris's trial for rescuing a fugitive slave, even though it seemed pretty clear the jury would acquit. Or how they described Robert Morris's peaceful death after decades of storied activism and a fruitful legal career, and then on the next page revealed the death of his only child Robert Jr. just 2 weeks later.
I liked this narrative style of an engaging storyline and celebrated heroes - Black community leaders and their white abolitionist allies.
I read this book upon learning about Boston's historically Black Beacon Hill neighborhood, from Bettina Love's We Want To Do More Than Survive. Sarah's Long Walk definitely fleshed out a vital period of the history of that community, who in a time when there were still slave states was agitating for equal school rights regardless of race, as well as making a lot of the antiracist and (modern-day) abolitionist teachings of WWTDMTS more concrete - principles like the necessity of civic/political education, mattering, educational survival vs thriving, giving them hell, homeplace, and the constant struggle (and inherent community-building and joy of that exercise) against the forces that undermine civil rights/dark people's freedom - white supremacy and white rage.
Besides that this history ALSO contextualizes today's educational landscape - in this book we see the first legal arguments for and against school integration, and the separatist tensions within the Black community itself. I think that is echoed today as we recognize the importance of HBCUs and some of the problems of PWIs. In the conclusion of Sarah's Long Walk the authors talk about how desegregation is still an issue (book published 2004) and cites magnet programs or remedies for historical redlining as ways forward. Here in 2021 Louisville we have so many public school magnet programs and extensive busing - and the legacy of that implementation of Brown v Board of Ed has been less than stellar in terms of educational outcomes for students of color and their families.
The theme that I was most struck by from this book - for Black abolitionists and their communities, the struggle against slavery and the struggle for civil rights as free(d) people were one and the same. Slaves would escape the South and then in the North not be allowed to work skilled labor trades or have/go to any schools. They were given the outside of cabins to ride on segregated trains, and interracial unions were illegal. What was freedom then? What is freedom now? Now I understand better what abolitionists today are (still) struggling for, and that being free is an active state, an act of participating in democracy and seeking to end injustices.
June 9, 2025
Boston is known for having one of the first public school system, which included the Abiel Smith School on the North Slope of Beacon Hill for Black students. As you would expect, this school was poorly maintained and underfunded compared with the schools for white children. Five-year-old Sarah C. Roberts had to pass several other schools on her walk to Abiel Smith, so her father tried to enroll her at closer schools but was denied. So her father Benjamin F. Roberts sued the City of Boston. The decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court favored Boston and was later used as a precedent by the Supreme Court for the "separate but equal" standard in Plessy v. Ferguson.
This case provides the heart of this history of activism in Boston's free Black community from the 1830s to the 1850s. Their actions would eventually get lead to the legislation for school integration in 1854. Other issues they faced during this period include the integration of railroads and the defense of enslaved people pursued by slave-catchers after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Key figures in this book include Black abolitionists Lewis Hayden, Rev. Leonard Grimes, Lydia Maria Child, John Hilton, William Cooper Nell, and lawyer Robert Morris, one of the first Black lawyers in the United States who argued the case with Charles Sumner.
This book is an excellent summary of an important and influential period of American history. It captures the significance of the Black community in 19th-century Boston towards abolition and civil rights. It also tracks the fine balance of Boston's place at the center of progressive racial justice while simultaneously being a place of white supremacy.
This case provides the heart of this history of activism in Boston's free Black community from the 1830s to the 1850s. Their actions would eventually get lead to the legislation for school integration in 1854. Other issues they faced during this period include the integration of railroads and the defense of enslaved people pursued by slave-catchers after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Key figures in this book include Black abolitionists Lewis Hayden, Rev. Leonard Grimes, Lydia Maria Child, John Hilton, William Cooper Nell, and lawyer Robert Morris, one of the first Black lawyers in the United States who argued the case with Charles Sumner.
This book is an excellent summary of an important and influential period of American history. It captures the significance of the Black community in 19th-century Boston towards abolition and civil rights. It also tracks the fine balance of Boston's place at the center of progressive racial justice while simultaneously being a place of white supremacy.
January 14, 2022
I am not surprised that a large portion of American History was left out of my Elementary, High School, and college courses. I had not heard of Sarah Roberts, Linda Brown or Barbara Johns. Nor had I heard of most of the people mentioned in this work. Though we have read of Charles Sumner and William Lloyd Garrison I hadn't, and I think most people haven't heard of Robert Morris or William Cooper Nell. Both Sarah Roberts and Linda Brown had to pass white schools to get to their segregated school. Neither girl was aware of their place in the fight for equality. Barbara Johns was well aware that the boycott she organized in Prince William County, Virginia after WW II was part of the fight. Sarah Roberts lived in antebellum Boston, Linda Brown in post WW II Kansas. Though the struggle started over school segregation it morphed into a fight for equality in every right. This is a book which should have prominence on African-American History Month reading lists.
September 6, 2023
This is an eye-opening, fascinating history of the largely forgotten Black reformers and activists who lived on the North Side of Beacon Hill, a few blocks and worlds away from the wealthy, white Brahmins usually associated with Beacon Hill--the top and south slopes, that is. (With some Charles Sumner and William Lloyd Garrison thrown in.) More than "just" a book about school integration efforts and the largely forgotten but influential case Sarah Roberts vs. the City of Boston, this book provides a difficult but, again, eye-opening, look into the lives of the free Blacks and escaped slaves--estimated to be 1/5 of Boston's Black population around 1850--who lived on Beacon Hill during the mid-19th century and the prejudice they encountered in every aspect of their lives. How is Robert Morris not better known?
June 1, 2018
Incredibly important historical subject, this book follows the story of Sarah Roberts and her family's struggle to get her and the other African American children of Boston access to equal education.
The book is fairly well written, mixing the narrative between the main players of the time and bringing the story in the late 1970s and Boston's busing lawsuits of that time.
However, I am really tired of history books that do not utilize proper citations! Please please please use endnotes, foot notes, parenthetical. SOMETHING! Where did your quotes come from?? Arg!
The book is fairly well written, mixing the narrative between the main players of the time and bringing the story in the late 1970s and Boston's busing lawsuits of that time.
However, I am really tired of history books that do not utilize proper citations! Please please please use endnotes, foot notes, parenthetical. SOMETHING! Where did your quotes come from?? Arg!
September 24, 2019
Story and education was great, but it read too much as a textbook for me.
June 20, 2016
Quotable:
This Revolutionary War generation chose to realize commonalities instead of racial differences. Crispus Attuck’s role in the Boston Massacre was often pointed to as the best example of shared class frustration vented by interracial groups at a common oppressor. In 1783 the Massachusetts Supreme Court abolished slavery, claiming it was clearly incompatible with the new state constitution of 1780… In fact, the economic climate of the northern states was inhospitable to the “peculiar Institution” of slavery, and by 1830 all states above Maryland were free states.
[In 1842 Massachusetts] the marriage bill was provoking antipathy. Yet new legislators were also starting to espouse rhetoric similar to that of the abolitionists. One Worchester representative declared, “No man is responsible for his color – God makes no distinction. As long as they are recognized as citizens, this law is an arbitrary one, and makes a distinction between one class of citizens to the degradation of the other.” Progress was being made.
Although Beacon Hill parents had managed to rid themselves of Forbes, their leaders were still furious that he had not been dismissed as a teacher, and moreover, that their charges were held as untrustworthy. Soon after the Forbes hearing, the School Committee reluctantly took up the remonstrations of the black community against the Smith School. They had a valuable ally on the committee, a Unitarian minister and reformer named John Turner Sargent. Born into a rich shipping family, Sargent rejected family pursuits to become a minister.
Black servicemen comprised more than 10 percent of Union forces by the end of the war. Their loses were felt keenly on Beacon Hill, especially after the battle of Fort Wagner, where the idealistic and courageous Col. Shaw lost his life along with nearly a quarter of the men of the Fifty-fourth.
The power of racism is vast and deep-rooted, and it is impossible to “win” except by the constant application of repeated failures that take us, inch by inch, toward a little decency in our common life.
This Revolutionary War generation chose to realize commonalities instead of racial differences. Crispus Attuck’s role in the Boston Massacre was often pointed to as the best example of shared class frustration vented by interracial groups at a common oppressor. In 1783 the Massachusetts Supreme Court abolished slavery, claiming it was clearly incompatible with the new state constitution of 1780… In fact, the economic climate of the northern states was inhospitable to the “peculiar Institution” of slavery, and by 1830 all states above Maryland were free states.
[In 1842 Massachusetts] the marriage bill was provoking antipathy. Yet new legislators were also starting to espouse rhetoric similar to that of the abolitionists. One Worchester representative declared, “No man is responsible for his color – God makes no distinction. As long as they are recognized as citizens, this law is an arbitrary one, and makes a distinction between one class of citizens to the degradation of the other.” Progress was being made.
Although Beacon Hill parents had managed to rid themselves of Forbes, their leaders were still furious that he had not been dismissed as a teacher, and moreover, that their charges were held as untrustworthy. Soon after the Forbes hearing, the School Committee reluctantly took up the remonstrations of the black community against the Smith School. They had a valuable ally on the committee, a Unitarian minister and reformer named John Turner Sargent. Born into a rich shipping family, Sargent rejected family pursuits to become a minister.
Black servicemen comprised more than 10 percent of Union forces by the end of the war. Their loses were felt keenly on Beacon Hill, especially after the battle of Fort Wagner, where the idealistic and courageous Col. Shaw lost his life along with nearly a quarter of the men of the Fifty-fourth.
The power of racism is vast and deep-rooted, and it is impossible to “win” except by the constant application of repeated failures that take us, inch by inch, toward a little decency in our common life.
September 29, 2012
It's fascinating and a good read, focusing on the case of Sarah Roberts, who was forced to attend an all-Black school in the early 19th century Boston. Her father sued the state for her right to attend a school close to her home and lost. This was the case that Lemuel Shaw (Melville's father in-law) created the concept of "separate but equal" for.
It's an inspirational read with lots to quote from. My favorites are a quote from Emerson and a quote from Robert Morris who was the first Black attorney to win a jury case in the US and the attorney for Sarah.
Morris, who also fought against the Fugitive Slave Law said,
Let us be bold, and they'll have to yield to us. Let us be bold, if any man flies from slavery, and comes among us. When he's reached us, we'll say, he's gone far enough. If any man comes here to New Bedford, and they try to take him away, you telegraph to us in Boston, and we'll come down three hundred strong, and stay with you; and we won't go until he's safe. If he goes back to the south, we'll go with him. And if any man runs away, and comes to Boston, we'll send to you, if necessary, and you may come up to us three hundred strong, if you can -- come men, and women, too.
The Emerson quote is used in the authors' epilogue where they're discussing what has happened since, and how modern schools are just as segregated as they used to be. Eternal vigilance and all that.
You can no more keep out of politics than you can keep out of the frost. And the authors added, "And it is cold out there."
It's an inspirational read with lots to quote from. My favorites are a quote from Emerson and a quote from Robert Morris who was the first Black attorney to win a jury case in the US and the attorney for Sarah.
Morris, who also fought against the Fugitive Slave Law said,
Let us be bold, and they'll have to yield to us. Let us be bold, if any man flies from slavery, and comes among us. When he's reached us, we'll say, he's gone far enough. If any man comes here to New Bedford, and they try to take him away, you telegraph to us in Boston, and we'll come down three hundred strong, and stay with you; and we won't go until he's safe. If he goes back to the south, we'll go with him. And if any man runs away, and comes to Boston, we'll send to you, if necessary, and you may come up to us three hundred strong, if you can -- come men, and women, too.
The Emerson quote is used in the authors' epilogue where they're discussing what has happened since, and how modern schools are just as segregated as they used to be. Eternal vigilance and all that.
You can no more keep out of politics than you can keep out of the frost. And the authors added, "And it is cold out there."
February 26, 2008
Started reading this for a work-related book club. Trying to finish it before it's due at the library! It is a very well-written, eye-opening history or free blacks living in antebellum Boston. A few revelations so far:
1. Although free, most Boston blacks were living in extreme poverty. On the surface, southern slaves had it better than their free counterparts -- slaves were able to sit in the up-scale train cars with thier owners. Free blacks had to sit in the squalid cars.
2. Boston was extremely prejudiced. Even abolitionists didn't believe in true, indisputable equality.
3. Charles Sumner didn't have a sense of humor, but he was a real badass.
1. Although free, most Boston blacks were living in extreme poverty. On the surface, southern slaves had it better than their free counterparts -- slaves were able to sit in the up-scale train cars with thier owners. Free blacks had to sit in the squalid cars.
2. Boston was extremely prejudiced. Even abolitionists didn't believe in true, indisputable equality.
3. Charles Sumner didn't have a sense of humor, but he was a real badass.
February 4, 2015
Fascinating story of the struggle for school equality in Boston, with quite a few surprises and pictures of people who did a lot for integration that you may never have heard of.
I highly recommend it for an understanding of race relations, demographics, and education in Boston today.
I highly recommend it for an understanding of race relations, demographics, and education in Boston today.
March 20, 2012
Fascinating - and a "MUST" for those living in the Boston area.
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