105 years before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision made school segregation illegal, a young Black father named Benjamin Roberts tried to take matters into his own hands to desegregate his city’s schools.
Benjamin had had enough of watching his two children have to walk past five whites-only schools, which his tax dollars funded, just to get to the nearest school that educated Black children. So he enrolled his five-year-old daughter at the whites-only school closest to their house. The school initially enrolled her, but expelled her after Benjamin tried to enroll his nine-year-old son as well. He sued the city and recruited two young attorneys to take the case all the way to the state’s highest court.
They lost the case, and Benjamin’s kids had to keep on walking. But the story doesn’t end there.
The racist rhetoric used by the court’s judge to justify the decision served as a template for the U.S. Supreme Court’s odious 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision that formally enshrined “separate but equal.”
Only, Benjamin’s battle didn’t happen south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It occurred in Massachusetts.
Benjamin and his family didn’t quit: with the support of activists, they successfully petitioned the Massachusetts State Legislature to outlaw school segregation in 1855. Almost exactly a century later, America followed suit—at least on paper.
Today, my six-year-old daughter, a mixed Black girl herself, now attends a public school in Boston that bears Sarah's name.
The lawyers who represented Benjamin and Sarah were Robert Morris, one of America’s very first Black lawyers, and abolitionist and future senator Charles Sumner, whose arguments against “separate but equal” were later cited in the Brown v. Board case.
Brown wasn’t a perfect solution in every respect.
The silent specters of redlining and the explosion of private schools, which emerged as an alternative for white parents fleeing integrated public schools, have allowed a system of de facto segregation to exist today despite that court precedent.
But as current events are showing us, we can’t give up the fight for progress simply because it’s imperfect. Because every time we think America has fully turned the corner, it throws the car into reverse.
As we speak, the United States is desperately trying to undo the Civil Rights Movement, and the gutting of the Department of Education is part of the gambit. Both Trump administrations have deprioritized public education in favor of the same “school choice” policies segregationists relied on post-Brown, and the department’s Office for Civil Rights has been gutted, resulting in a massive failure to protect vulnerable students.
