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Morris and Sumner represented Benjamin and Sarah Roberts when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court heard the case on November 1, 1849. At this hearing, Sumner gave a fiery speech that spoke to the injustice of segregated schooling.
Eventually, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts heard the case, in which Benjamin Roberts listed his daughter Sarah as the Plaintiff and the City of Boston as the Defendant. Not all African-Americans supported Roberts; most believed in "separate but equal" schooling and questioned the kind of education their children would receive from a white ...
- 59 Mass. 198, 5 Cush. 198
- Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Suffolk
- November 1849
- Sarah C. Roberts vs. The City of Boston
May 18, 2010 · The City of Boston •. (1850) Sarah C. Roberts vs. The City of Boston. Excluded from school, Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1839, p. 13. The general school committee of the city of Boston have power, under the constitution and laws of this commonwealth, to make provision for the instruction of colored children, in separate schools established ...
Sarah C. Roberts vs. The City of Boston. In 1848, the city required Sarah Roberts, a five-year-old African American, to enroll in an all-black public elementary school. The Abiel Smith School, one of a number of segregated schools for “colored” children in Boston, was far from where the family lived. Benjamin Roberts, Sarah’s father and ...
At the age of five, Sarah Roberts was at the center of a lawsuit against racially segregated public schools in Boston in 1847. Roberts, a Black girl, was denied the equal right to attend the public school of her choice, forced instead to walk past five public schools to the Black-only Abiel Smith School in the old West End.
The article in The Liberator, the lawsuit Sarah C. Roberts v. the City of Boston, and Boyden’s full diary entry all give examples of the harms of segregation and actions Black families took in opposition to segregation. Each also puts forth a vision of citizenship.
In the 1840s Benjamin Roberts of Boston began a legal campaign to enroll his five-year-old daughter, Sarah, in a nearby school for whites. The Massachusetts Supreme Court ultimately ruled that local elected officials had the authority to control local schools and that separate schools did not violate black students’ rights.
