There is More to the Story

Jan 19, 2020

By Reverend Rebecca Bryan

Tomorrow is the thirty-fourth year that we have honored the legacy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. The idea of commemorating Dr. King’s legacy began in 1968, four days after his assassination, when Representative John Conyers introduced the first bill. It took eighteen years for it to become law, with periods of lesser and greater attention paid to it over that time.

I’ve preached my fair share of sermons on Martin Luther King Day, focusing on everything from his most famous speech to more obscure sermons and his personal life and theology. This year, I want to lift up the concept of interconnection through the lens of school desegregation, an issue of deep significance to Dr. King.

I do this using true stories of people known and unknown in our country, state, and congregation. I believe Dr. King would not have wanted to be idolized. His goal was to galvanize, connect, and empower people to come together in a common vision of equity for all people. He called us to do our part in making that goal a reality.

“Don’t sleep through the revolution” was the phrase he used when speaking to the General Assembly of Unitarian Universalist congregations in 1966.

The history books of this congregation emphasize education as one of the church’s highest priorities in the mid-1700s. The parish hired a Latin teacher to ensure students had access to such knowledge and matched the town’s funding appropriation for schools. This focus on education followed an expression of concern about the “decaying and languishing state of religion” and about parishioners who frequented the local tavern at the expense of the Sabbath, instead of maintaining “order in their homes…”[1]

There were wealthy parishioners who owned enslaved people. And, as we learned in our Time for All Ages, slaves were segregated and seated in the “most remote and least desirable parts of the gallery…”[2]

It is of great note that Judge John Lowell, the only son of the first minister of this congregation, was the impetus behind  a critical sentence written into the Massachusetts Constitution, “All men are born free and equal,”[3] a phrase whose echoes resounded throughout the history of our state and country, as we will hear today.

The phrase “All men are born free and equal” led to slavery being abolished in Massachusetts. It was also distorted into “Equal and Separate” used to support segregated schools in Boston until 1855 when the state rendered segregation illegal. We lived through a contemporary use of the phrase in the battle for marriage equality, affirming that civil union is not the same as marriage.

The story of school desegregation in Boston is layered. Its influence was keenly felt in the 1954 Supreme Court Case Brown v. Board of Education, which made school segregation in our country illegal.

However, we know the story doesn’t end there. As recently as 2011, one-third of black children attended schools that were more than ninety percent black, while the average white child attended schools that were eighty percent white.[4] The issue is a topic of discussion among candidates in the 2020 Presidential Campaign. It has not been discussed during presidential campaigns for a long time.

Segregation doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It intersects with poverty, racism, the income gap, climate change, and many other issues. The interconnectedness of oppression and its causes is real. So too is the interconnectedness of justice and those who work for justice. No issue stands alone. No person stands alone. Not now. Not ever. For good and bad, we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors, as our descendants will stand on ours.

The tendency to idolize individuals as heroes or villains is not only a distortion of the truth, but also a warning of danger. Namely that we assume that we as private citizens, “average people,” do not have the power to influence change. We look at people like Dr. King and think, “Not me.”

Change, both good or bad, does not come about due to one person or one episode. It is a result of the never-ending interconnected web of life, of ordinary people’s actions and the outcomes of those actions.

The struggle for integration in Boston’s schools has a particularly important period between 1847 and 1855. It began with a case in 1847 brought by a Boston resident on behalf of his four-year-old daughter. It was the first case for school desegregation in American history.

At the time, Beacon Hill in Boston was one of the largest communities of free blacks in America. A condensed area of ten blocks by ten blocks contained two worlds within it — the wealthy elites on one side and 3,000 blacks on the Northern Side. The Smith School, which black students attended and around which this story of school integration occurs, was on that Northern Side, where now are the Museum of Afro-American History and the African Meeting House.

The story begins when the father, Benjamin Roberts, fought for the rights of his daughter Sarah to attend the school closest in walking distance to the family’s home, a convenience that white children had as a matter of course and of law.

At that time, 170 years ago, all black children, regardless of where they lived on Beacon Hill, walked to the Smith School, the school for black children, supported by the city.

Roberts found this law unacceptable and brought his daughter to be enrolled in a white school nearer to their home. She was denied entry to the first school, but for some unknown reason was accepted at the second. Young Sarah attended Otis School for two weeks until she was forcibly removed by a police officer.

Her father obtained the services of two attorneys, Robert Morris and Charles Sumner. Morris had recently passed the bar. Because of the Roberts case, he became the first in a long history of black attorneys working for social change by taking on a civil rights case. Sumner, a white abolitionist who grew up on Beacon Hill, was well regarded by the black community. Frederick Douglass said of him “…none have uttered the feelings of the black man so well.”[5]

The young child, Sarah Roberts, descended from a lineage of resistors. Her grandfather, James Easter, a black veteran of the Revolutionary War, protested the practice of blacks sitting in the “Negro gallery” in church. As an act of resistance, he bought a pew for his family in the white section of the Baptist Church in Stoughton Corner, MA, though the family was told not to sit there. One Sunday, the family came to church to discover their pew had been torn down. From then on, the family sat in the aisle.[6]

It’s unclear whether Sarah was in the courtroom when Morris and Sumner made their case the first time, suing the city for $600 on account of violating the 1845 statute which offered monetary compensation for any child excluded from school. They lost when a decision was issued six months later supporting school segregation.

Reverend Stephen Kendrick, minister of First and Second Unitarian Church in Boston, and his son Paul, authors of the book Sarah’s Long Walk, describe school segregation as “one of the most powerful impulses of American life.”[7]

It was certainly a complicated issue during the early and mid-1800s. Slavery had been illegal in Massachusetts for nearly half a century, but school segregation was not an anomaly. Travel, entertainment, and military service were also segregated, and interracial marriage was illegal. Support for school segregation was not just found among “racists.” It was found among white abolitionists who feared drawing attention to the poor conditions of the free blacks in the North and found in the black community among those who hoped for the best education for their children.

The fight for integration didn’t stop with the first loss of the Roberts case. During that time Morris lost an appeal to Roberts as well as another case in 1853. This second case of school segregation involved Edward Pindall, a light-skinned, multi-racial student who was forcefully removed from a white school on Beacon Hill. Morris also lost on a case for desegregation in the military. The 1848 Roberts appeal laid the groundwork that ultimately brought about the law abolishing school segregation in Massachusetts in 1855.

It is believed that Morris and Sumner were the first interracial team ever to cosign a legal brief.[8] Morris focused on the practicalities the black students dealt with, while Sumner approached it philosophically. Sumner translated the phrase “equality before the law” used in the French Revolution, forcing the point that without diversity, the whole of a school suffers.[9] The judge took that phrase and twisted it to mean “Equal but Separate,”[10] reinforcing the sentiment made by the Boston School Committee in 1846 as this: “The less the colored and white people become intermingled, the better it will be for both races.”[11] By 1853 Boston was the only municipality in Massachusetts still segregating schools.

It was a black activist named William Cooper Nell who in his outrage at this decision started a petition to the state. He secured 1500 signatures in support of school integration from around the state.[12] It was presented to the state legislature in the spring of 1855 by Charles Slack, who relied heavily on the work of Morris and Sumner and their previously failed cases.

Seven years after the Roberts appeal, Massachusetts passed the law abolishing school segregation. The legislature was responding in part to the petition mentioned above and also to the indisputable evidence and work of the Roberts case and appeal.

Boston schools were largely integrated for the next twenty years, until forces related to race, wealth, and poverty began to coalesce, and the tides turned back toward segregation. And there is more to that story, which continues today.

Nearly 100 years after the Roberts case, Brown v. Board of Education brought the issue of school de-segregation to the Supreme Court. Key to its success was the four-year-old girl who lived on Beacon Hill in Boston.

Thurgood Marshall would not take credit for winning Brown v. Board of Education. It was change, he said, that came from “…the courage of forgotten people…who never gave up their fight against the relics of slavery.”[13]

Martin Luther King received his doctorate from Boston University in 1955, around the same time as Brown v. Board of Education. He described the decision as “…one of the most momentous decisions ever rendered in the history of this nation…” reminding his listeners that its promise would not be fulfilled until all forms of segregation were erased from society.[14]

May we choose to be part of the interconnected web of people who work for justice, honoring and remembering those upon whose shoulders we stand, and dedicating our work to the generations to come.

Amen

 

 

[1] A History of The First Religious Society, Newburyport, Massachusetts, Volume I 1725-1933. Pgs. 15-16.

[2] Ibid. Pg. 18.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Kendrick Stephen and Paul, Sarah’s Long Walk, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 2004.

[5] Ibid. Pg. 142.

[6] Ibid. Pg. 100.

[7] Ibid. Pg. xii.

[8] Ibid. Pg. 154.

[9] Ibid. Pg. 166.

[10] Ibid. Pg. 176.

[11] Ibid. Pg. 70.

[12] Ibid. Pg. 227.

[13] Ibid. Pg. xxii.

[14] “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Living the Dream: The Promise of Brown v. Board of Education and Martin Luther King Jr.” National Park Service, Education Newsletter.

Questions to ponder, discuss and hold…

Whose shoulders do you stand on in your life and work today?

If you were to win an award, who would you bring onto the stage with you?

What principles are you willing to sacrifice for?

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