The Other Side of Beacon Hill

by Ken Winston 

In the Fall of 2023, Mary Jo and I took a course on “Antebellum Black Boston” at HILR (the Harvard Institute for Learning in Retirement), which focused on a little-known part of Boston’s social history. 

Our reading was the book Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick, published in 2004 (appropriately) by Beacon Press.

The course was led by Jim Whitters, a lawyer and long-time figure in Boston politics whose family residence is on Mt. Vernon Street.

It is common these days for book titles to describe their subject as having “changed America,” but in this instance it’s true that events in the early history of Boston had a profound impact on subsequent legal developments in the United States.

The story highlights events that led to a decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1854 regarding the right of children to attend a neighborhood school.  The presiding judge in the case was Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw who also lived on Mt. Vernon Street – that is, the south side of Beacon Hill – and the plaintiff was the five-year-old Sarah Roberts who lived on the north side.  The problem was that, to get to the school she was permitted to attend, Sarah Roberts had to walk past several other schools that were open only to white students.  Hence, “Sarah’s long walk” – to the all-black Abiel Smith School on Joy Street.

Perhaps a little background is in order.

Beginning in the colonial period, the north side of Beacon Hill had a substantial black population – in contrast to the patrician community on the south side.  By the 1830’s, there were about 3,000 black people on the north side, constituting more than half of the black population of Boston.  By 1850, more than 70% of the black population resided there.

This was a thriving community, with its own churches, businesses, and political organizations.  Today the African American Meeting House remains the oldest African American church building in the US.

Massachusetts had been the first state to abolish slavery, as provided in its constitution, and blacks were able to vote from 1780.  But in the early 19th century the struggle for integration was ongoing, with particular focus on transportation, marriage, and schools.  Only in 1843 did the state legislature repeal the ban on interracial marriage and railroad companies voluntarily ended segregation on trains.  These victories gave hope for the schools, but for a long time the powers that be on the Boston School Committee resisted.

The depth of resistance in the city can be gauged, in a general way, by the fact that white antislavery activists were known to segregate abolitionist meetings.

In the early 19th century, many cities and towns in Massachusetts had integrated schools, but the black populations in those places were small.  Only in 1855 did Boston open its public school to African Americans – becoming the first major US city to do so – but that was a result of action taken by the Massachusetts Legislature, not the state courts.

 One of the more curious aspects of this story is that the Legislature, at that point, was dominated by members of the Know-Nothing Party.  For reasons that remain a bit mysterious, the Know-Nothings were more preoccupied by the influx of immigrants from Europe than the growing equality of black Americans.  So, they ended up advancing a progressive political agenda before being thrown out of office about as quickly as they had been installed.  (Perhaps the Know-Nothings should be a topic for another installment of the newsletter.  In 1856, most Know-Nothings became Republicans, that is, members of Lincoln’s new party.)

What happened, then, to Sarah Roberts?  Her case came to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 1849, six years before the Legislature acted.  And Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw wasn’t ready to take on a pioneering role.

Shaw was a constitutionalist, not a moralist.  When the law permitted him to act against slavery, he did so.  This happened, for example, in an 1836 case involving a slave who had been transported to New England – free territory – by her owner.  The question for Shaw was: Could a slave still be held as a slave when on free soil?  Shaw pronounced that it would be contrary to “natural right” as well as “numerous provisions” of the Massachusetts Constitution.

But in Sarah’s case in 1849, Shaw held back.  He said the case raised two questions: [1] Who has the authority to decide whether schools are (or are not) to be racially segregated? and [2] What’s the role of a constitution in judicial deliberations?

On the first, Shaw was inclined to defer to the School Committee, because the Committee had more intimate knowledge of the situation in the city than any panel of judges.  The question fell within the Committee’s jurisdiction, like the question whether to have separate schools for girls and boys.  On the second, Shaw declared that the purpose of a constitution is to guide the conscience of legislators rather than to limit and control them by judicial review.

This is a novel theory of constitutional interpretation, from our perspective, but we should note that some modern constitutions, such as India’s, contain an equivalent idea by making some provisions aspirational rather than binding.

Shaw concluded, to his own satisfaction, that he was upholding the principle of equality before the law, but that principle, he said, does not preclude taking account of “circumstances and conditions.”  The result was an affirmation of what became known as “separate but equal.”  And, indeed, Shaw’s decision was cited in the famous (or perhaps I should say notorious) 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which was not overturned until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

If the result in 1849 seems dispiriting, I would point out that one of the lawyers on Sarah Roberts’ side was Charles Sumner, also a resident of Beacon Hill but on the north side.  Sumner became known later for his fierce advocacy of abolition as a US Senator, but the Kendricks highlight his remarkable brief for Sarah Roberts which anticipated, by a century, the arguments that became crucial in Brown.

Sumner wrote in compelling terms about the psychological impact of caste distinctions and the stigma of inferiority generated by state-sanctioned segregation.  Separate schools, he wrote, “deepen and perpetuate the odious distinction of caste, founded in a deep-rooted prejudice in public opinion.”

Sumner also observed that segregation injures white people as well as blacks, thus anticipating a point underscored by Justice Thurgood Marshall a hundred years later.

In sum, while this brief summary does not include all the figures of interest in the story of  “Sarah’s long walk,” I can say that the Kendricks’ book offers an engaging account of the early years of what we realize today is a continuing struggle.