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How Free Blacks from Boston Changed America

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Date and time
Friday, February 24, 2006

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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Paul Kendrick is an author of popular history. With his father, Stephen Kendrick, Paul co-authored *Sarah's Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America*, which describes the legal case, Roberts v. Boston, brought on behalf of Sarah Roberts, a black child who was not allowed to attend any of the five "whites-only" schools she passed on her daily walks to school, and the effect this had on the effort to desegregate Boston schools in the 1840's. The case led to the Separate but equal justification for segregation. The book was named among the best non-fiction of 2005 by the Christian Science Monitor. He has also co-authored (with his father) *Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union*, published in December of 2007. As a student at George Washington University, Paul Kendrick served as President of the college's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter and also as a Presidential Administrative Fellow. He is currently an assistant director of the Harlem Children's Zone.
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