Chapter I: The Supremacy of Equal Rights

Abstract

The black and white abolitionist agitation of the school integration issue in Massachusetts from 1840 to 1855 gave us the first school integration case filed in America, the first state Supreme Court decision reported on the issue, and the first state-wide law banning racial discrimination in admission to educational institutions. Who favored and who opposed school integration, and what arguments did each side make? Were the types of arguments that they offered different in different forums? Were they different from 20th century arguments? Why did the movement triumph, and why did it take so long to do so? What light does the struggle throw on views on race relations held by members of the antebellum black and white communities, on the character of the abolitionist movement, and on the development of legal doctrines about racial equality? Perhaps more generally, how should historians go about assessing the weight of different reasons that policymakers adduced for their actions, and how flawed is a legal history that confines itself to strictly legal materials? How can social scientific theory and statistical techniques be profitably applied to politico-legal history? Part of a larger project on the history of court cases and state and local provisions on racial discrimination in schools, this paper introduces many of the main themes, issues, and methods to be employed in the rest of the book.

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