Steven Kendrick and Paul Kendrick discuss the 1847 Massachusetts Supreme Court case of schoolgirl Sarah Roberts, and the lasting impact it made in American history. In 1847, on windswept Beacon Hill, a 5-year-old girl named Sarah Roberts was forced to walk past five white schools to attend the poor and densely crowded black school. Her father, Benjamin, sued the city of Boston on her behalf, turning to 24-year-old Robert Morris, the first black attorney to win a jury case in America. Together with young lawyer Charles Sumner, this legal team forged a powerful argument against school segregation that has reverberated down through American history in a direct legal line to Brown v. Board of Education. When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled against Sarah Roberts, Chief Justice Shaw created the concept of "separate but equal", an idea that effected every aspect of American life until it was overturned 100 years later by Thurgood Marshall.
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