Educational Inequality: The Roots of “Separate but Equal”

Vocabulary & Key Terms:

• benefactor 
• caste
• petitioners
• physiology
• plaintiff
• precedent

Student Context:

A community of free African American people had begun to grow and flourish in Boston in the early 1800s, fueled by Massachusetts’ abolition of slavery in 1783. At the same time, the early to mid-1800s brought with it many efforts to improve life for all Americans, including efforts to provide free public schools, known as the Common School Movement. Led by Horace Mann, secretary of the newly founded Massachusetts Board of Education, the focus was on ensuring ethical and democratic participation in society. 

African Americans, free and enslaved, had long recognized that literacy, freedom and equality were closely tied together. The Common School movement in Massachusetts now raised their hopes for educational opportunity. Free Black people knew, and began to argue, that as tax paying citizens, it was the right of their children to access quality public schools. 

By 1840, Boston had a thriving public school system. The Boston School District operated a two-tiered system of schooling that placed White students in neighborhood schools across the city and Black students in one school–the Abiel Smith School. Though this school had begun with private funding, the Abiel Smith School was officially established in 1835 as the first public school for Black children in the country. 

However, by the 1840s, many questions about the quality of education provided to children at the Smith School were raised by parents. Often, schools with better outcomes and resources were closer to where a Black family lived, but their children were categorically excluded based on race. In 1848, recognizing the inequality at play, an African American writer and printer, Benjamin Franklin Roberts, chose to challenge this barrier. He attempted multiple times to enroll his daughter Sarah in one of the White neighborhood schools which were closer to their home. 

Each time, the school committee rejected his requests and assigned his daughter to the Smith School. Frustrated with the injustice of having to watch his children travel across the city to attend a lower-quality school, Roberts filed a lawsuit against the city of Boston. The case of Sarah Roberts vs. the City of Boston cited that this policy of segregation violated the Massachusetts Constitution. 

Judge Lemuel Shaw of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, disagreed with the Roberts family. He sided with the Boston school committee, asserting that no law had been broken because Black students did have access to public education, the city was simply providing a separate environment for their access. This ruling set the precedent for the “separate, but equal” argument upholding racial segregation in countless cases for the next 100 years following the Roberts v. City of Boston ruling. 

Going forward, the Black community and abolitionist allies continued to agitate for educational equality, but with a more limited set of strategies available. It was not until the US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that the legal underpinnings of racial segregation began to unravel, opening a legal path toward educational equality.