Before Integration: The Forgotten Years of Jim Crow Education in Boston

The desegregation effort which culminated in the abolition of separate schools in Mass in 1855 has been examined by many scholars. Surprisingly, the establishment of a separate school system in Boston has never been told. In the years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, Boston's black population was the largest of any city in Mass. Described are how & when the separate schools in the city were organized, & the role of blacks themselves in establishing the system of segregated education. The account begins at the turn of the century; by the 1840s, when the United States was swept by its first great Age of Reform, separatism was indefensible on two grounds: it vitiated the propaganda efforts of those seeking to abolish slavery in the United States, & it gave whites a justification to perpetuate caste. But for fifty years blacks in Boston were educated separately. Modified AA.