Summary
"The impression made on my mind," Nell later said, "by this day's experience, deepened into a solemn vow that, God helping me, I would do my best to hasten the day when the color of the skin would be no barrier to equal school rights." Nell became a champion of equal school rights, finally achieved in 1855.
Nell's Liberator articles on black Boston activities and achievements provide invaluable insight into the community. Nell was frequently the secretary of community meetings; his detailed minutes were later published in The Liberator. Nell provided leadership in literary, dramatic, abolitionist, Underground Railroad and equal rights organizations in Boston. He also authored the first military history of African Americans, "Colored Patriots of the American Revolution and the War of 1812."In 1849, printer Benjamin Roberts sued the City of Boston to allow his five-year-old daughter [Sarah Grimke] to attend a school near her home and not a distant segregated school. Equal school rights lawyers Charles Sumner and Robert Morris eloquently argued Sarah's case before Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, but Shaw rejected their arguments. Shaw agreed that Sarah was entitled to equal rights in education, but maintained that such rights could be achieved in the segregated primary school on Beacon Hill. Sarah Roberts' landmark case introduced the concept of "separate and equal" to maintain racially segregated educational facilities.See the full content of this document
Extract
Black History Month 2007
Two hundred years ago, on Dec. 6, 1806, Rev. Thomas Paul must have marveled at what he saw. The three-story brick building wasn't much - "plain and commodious," one writer said at the time.
But it was never just about the bricks and mortar. It was about the most basic of ideas, an idea born in the American Revolution and tested during the Civil War - that all men, black and white, were created equal and "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."Built on a little patch of land on the North Slope of Beacon Hill, the building was called the African Meeting House. Inside was a church, Paul's church.For the next 200 years, the idea of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" breathed in the lives of those who pra...See the full content of this document
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