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Roberts v. The City of Boston (1850)
2 articles on Roberts v. The City of Boston (1850)
Roberts v. City of Boston
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1073 Includes: BibliographySarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston, 59 Mass. 198–210 (5 Cush.) (1850) was the first case to challenge the practice of school segregation of blacks in the North. This case anticipated by more than a century the arguments made against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In 1849 Benjamin Roberts sued the city of Boston for denying his daughter the right to attend the school closest to the family's house, which was a whites-only school. Roberts had previously made several unsuccessful attempts to have his daughter admitted to a school closer to her home; Sarah Robertsin fact had to pass several all-white schools before reaching the black institution she attended, the Smith Grammar School, which was located a considerable distance from her home. This suit was the culmination of an ongoing effort by black parents to do ...
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Word Count: 1830Much of the courage evinced by black people in the toxic atmosphere of the institutionalized racism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America was born from a desire for a better life for their children. In case after case, African Americans brought their grievances before local boards of regents, state supreme courts, and sometimes even the U.S. Supreme Court, and of course it was the Court's monumental decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), a case that explicitly made an exception for public schools in the longstanding and oft-challenged policy of “separate but equal,” that was subsequently broadened and applied to all public institutions to at last end the hated practice of segregation. If Brownwas the long hoped for decision in the battleRoberts ...
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