Excerpt from Boston African American National Historic Site: Draft General Management Plan and Environmental Assessment

Between 1839 and 1855, the city of Boston witnessed the first of several racial controversies concerning public schools. William C. Nell, who had attended school in the meetinghouse as a child, initiated a movement for the day when color of skin would be no barrier to equal school rights.

Founder of the Equal School Association, Nell organized an 11 - year - long boycott of the Abiel Smith School, where black children from all over the city had to go to school. The association was protesting inequality of curriculum, level of instruction and physical facilities. In 1848, Benjamin Roberts had attempted to enroll his daughter Sarah in each of the five public schools that stood between their home and the Smith School. When Sarah was denied entrance to all of them, Roberts sued the city under an 1845 statute providing recovery of damages for any child unlawfully denied public school instruction. Abolitionists joined the case in 1849 with Charles Sumner representing Sarah, and black attorney Robert Morris acting as co-counsel. The case was argued before Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the Supreme Judicial Court, who in 1850 ruled that Sumner and Roberts had not shown that the Smith School was inferior, or that it offered instruction inferior to that in other Boston schools. Undeterred, Nell and the Equal School Association moved their cause to the halls of the State House. A bill to end segregation in public schools failed in 1851, but a similar measure was passed in 1855 by the State Legislature and signed by the governor, although by that time Boston had the only segregated system in the Commonwealth.

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