Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

by Kate Masur

The most significant school desegregation lawsuit of the period was Roberts v. City of Boston, argued in the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1849. In that case, Benjamin Roberts, a Black printer whose parents had been part of an earlier generation of New England Black activists, sued the city of Boston for establishing segregated schools that barred his daughter from attending the school in her neighborhood. Roberts’s lawyers were Robert Morris, the state’s second African American attorney and the first to argue a case before a jury, and Charles Sumner, a white man and a rising figure in Massachusetts Whig politics. Sumner’s brief against Boston’s segregated schools encapsulated and advanced many of the arguments that civil rights activists had been making for decades. The central theme was “equality before the law.” Sumner argued that the impulse to draw racial distinctions was a residue of slavery and that it reflected a spirit of “caste” associated with monarchies and feudalism, not republics like the United States. The state constitution’s declaration that “all men are born free and equal” made racial discrimination illegal, he argued. Addressing legal questions about the appropriate scope of regulation, he argued that it might be “reasonable” for the school board to classify students by age, sex, or ability, but that it was entirely inappropriate to “brand a whole race with the stigma of inferiority and degradation, constituting them into a caste.” The Massachusetts Su...