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Sarah's Long Walk

The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America

Authors: Stephen Kendrick, Paul Kendrick

In 1847, on windswept Beacon Hill in Boston, a five-year-old girl named Sarah Roberts was forced to walk past five white schools to attend the poor and densely crowded black school. Incensed that his daughter had been turned away at each white school, her father, Benjamin, sued the city of Boston on her behalf.

He turned to twenty-four-year-old Robert Morris, the first black attorney ever to win a jury case in America. Together with young Brahmin lawyer Charles Sumner, this legal team forged a powerful argument against school desegregation 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 affected every aspect of American life until it was overturned one hundred years later by Thurgood Marshall.

Today, few have heard of the Roberts case or of the three thousand free blacks in Boston who fought valiantly and successfully-long before the civil rights movement of the 1960s-to integrate schools, theaters, and railway cars; to legalize interracial marriage; and to form the first black army regiment. Now, Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick tell the inspiring story of the remarkable activist community of which Sarah and her family were a part, bringing to light the human side of this crucial struggle.

Sarah's Long Walk recovers stories of black and white Boston, of Beacon Hill in the nineteenth century, and of all the concerned citizens, both white and black, who participated in the early struggles for equal rights. The result is a rich historical tapestry, a fascinating story of the courage and conviction of ordinary people who achieved extraordinary things.

"A truly outstanding account of the struggles of some extraordinary people-the 'ordinary' black citizens of pre-Civil War Boston. Supremely gifted historians in every respect, Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick have given us an exceptionally full and compelling history of the antebellum struggle for racial equality in the nation's Birthplace of Liberty."
-James Brewer Stewart, author of Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery

"Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick have succeeded where professional historians have failed. They not only have rescued important African American figures from historical obscurity but have brought them back to life, walking the streets and breathing the air of nineteenth-century Boston. They will make Robert Morris, William C. Nell, and Benjamin and Sarah Roberts as familiar to us as Charles Sumner. More importantly, they focus our attention on the victory African Americans achieved against segregation in the cradle of liberty and have demonstrated its relevance to us today. They have connected the past with the present-they have made the past present."
-Donald Yacovone, author of Freedom's Journey: African American Voices of the Civil War

"An absorbing book about the heroic and successful struggle of Boston's black community during the antebellum period to desegregate the public schools of their city. This well-written and carefully documented account of Roberts v. City of Boston is greatly enhanced by biographical studies of figures like Benjamin Roberts, Sarah's father; William Cooper Nell, the indefatigable black abolitionist; and Robert Morris, the black lawyer who pleaded the Roberts case and who finally receives the historical recognition he richly deserves."
-Thomas H. O'Connor, University Historian, Boston College

Stephen Kendrick is the author of a novel, Night Watch, as well as Holy Clues: The Gospel According to Sherlock Holmes. He is senior minister at First and Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston. Paul Kendrick has worked as a director of the Democratic National Committee's grassroots campaign. He is a Presidential Arts Scholar at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he also serves as NAACP chapter president.