Abiel Smith School: Crucible of School Desegregation

Why is it significant?

Turn just a few steps around the corner to forty-six Joy Street and pause before this handsome two-story brick schoolhouse.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Turn just a few steps around the corner to forty-six Joy Street and pause before this handsome two-story brick schoolhouse. Opened in eighteen thirty-five, the Abiel Smith School holds the proud yet painful distinction of being the first public school building in the entire country erected solely for Black schoolchildren.

When wealthy white merchant Abiel Smith died in eighteen fifteen, he left a generous bequest of four thousand dollars to the City of Boston to educate African-American children. Boston authorities constructed this building, but deliberately starved it of books, desks, and repair funds while funneling tax revenues to all-white schools just down the hill.

Black parents on Beacon Hill refused to accept second-class treatment. In eighteen forty-nine, parent Benjamin Roberts sued the city after his five-year-old daughter Sarah was forced to walk past five white neighborhood schools to reach Joy Street. Though Roberts lost in the state supreme court, Boston's Black community organized a relentless school boycott. Their persistence led the Massachusetts Legislature in eighteen fifty-five to pass the nation's very first law outlawing school segregation—a century before the landmark Brown versus Board of Education ruling.

Look at the red brick pediment above the door: here, courageous parents proved that ordinary citizens can change the laws of a nation.