An African School for African Americans: Black Demands for Education in Antebellum Boston

This article examines Black parents’ efforts to establish and secure quality education for their children in antebellum Boston, Massachusetts. It situates the African School, a Black-owned cultural institution, within Black nationalist politics and reveals how the schoolhouse became a site of political tension between Black Bostonians and the Boston School Committee. Analyzing petitions, school records, and newspapers, this essay finds that the African School cultivated Black citizenship ideologies that prioritized political activism. This study invites new understandings of the political intersections of education and citizenship, and it illuminates the utility of Black nationalism in antebellum Boston.

Bright Flight: Desegregating Boston’s Elite Public Schools, 1960-2000

This article uses Boston as a case study to examine how elite, public schools that admitted students on the basis of “merit” perpetuated segregation and inequity in urban school systems. Merit justified the unequal allocation of educational opportunities, and the group that benefited most from merit-based admissions were families who could afford to send their children to private primary schools before “testing into” public secondary schools. I argue that merit-based admissions facilitated bright flight: the loss of high-achieving students from neighborhood schools. This study complicates and offers a new perspective on Boston school desegregation and has timely implications for our current historical moment.

Searching for Sarah: Black Girlhood, Education, and the Archive

Roberts v. City of Boston is a well-known legal case in the history of US education. In 1847, the Boston School Committee denied Sarah C. Roberts, a five-year-old African American girl, admission to the public primary school closest to her home. She was instead ordered to attend the all-black Abiel Smith School, about a half-mile walk from her home. In March 1848, Sarah's father, Benjamin, sued the city of Boston for denying Sarah the right to attend the public school closest to her home. The case wound its way through the courts, eventually reaching the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In 1850, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled in favor of the city of Boston, affirming that the Boston School Committee had “not violated any principle of equality, inasmuch as they have provided a school with competent instructors for the colored children, where they enjoy equal advantages of instruction with those enjoyed by the white children.” And thus, the doctrine of separate but equal was born in Massachusetts.

Drawing Forth Spirits

A decade after establishing the Athenaeum gallery, reformers’ concerns about the sensualism of public art exhibition culture led them to promote yet another source of moral instruction: amateur drawing. Still hoping to create a generation of pious and rational observers, Boston school reformers such as Elizabeth Peabody introduced drawing in the 1830s as a non-sectarian substitute for moral instruction. Simultaneously, industrial reformers promoted drawing at Boston’s popular artisan fair as a lingua franca for affluent connoisseurs and technically-minded mechanics. As drawing shifted from a polite art to a moral pursuit, critics feared the practice encouraged hollow mechanical imitation. Draughtsmen responded by embracing a more ethereal, Romantic visual idiom, transforming amateur drawing into a medium of Spiritualism and occultism.

Public School/Catholic School: 1914–World War II

Even though Cardinal O’Connell believed that Catholic schooling was the only adequate answer to the education of Catholic youth, he did not come close to fully implementing this conviction. Events in Boston largely took schooling out of O’Connell’s hands. By the 1910s, Irish Catholics had taken over the Boston public schools. Simultaneously, Irish politicians took over the city and a majority of Irish Catholics now controlled the Boston School Committee, appointing an Irish Catholic educator as the city’s school superintendent. By at least the 1920s, the public and parochial schools had taken giant steps toward one another in theory and practice under the leadership of the Catholics who presided over both systems. Though Cardinal O’Connell and his circle continued to preach the need for Catholic children to attend parochial schools, parents, most of whom had attended public schools themselves, knew that the public schools would not undermine their children’s faith.

The Role of Religious Politics in the Dismissal of Lowell Mason from the Boston Public Schools in 1845

This study investigates the role of religious politics in the dismissal of Mason in 1845. Related questions are (a) How volatile an issue was religious sectarianism during the early days of music in the Boston schools? (b) What were the religious backgrounds and convictions of the School Committee members responsible for dismissing Lowell Mason in relation to those of Mason himself? and (c) Does evidence support religious controversy as playing a significant role in Mason’s dismissal? Members of the Committee on Music, a subcommittee of the Boston School Committee, gave cryptic reasons for Mason’s dismissal, reasons that have left modern researchers to little more than conjecture. One of the accusations against Mason, both in a journal a year earlier, and from a member of the Committee on Music, suggests that he had hired assistants with an eye to religious favoritism. Researchers have regarded that accusation as probably insignificant. However, further study of Boston’s volatile religious climate, and the spiritual convictions of Mason and those who rejected him, point to religious animosities as a substantial factor impacting his departure from the schools.

Garland, Hamlin

A prolific author whose early writings established him as a promising realist in American literature, Hannibal Hamlin Garland, who went by his middle name, was born on a farm in West Salem, Wisconsin, on September 4, 1860. His family moved around the Middle Border, now known as the Midwest, before settling in Mitchell County, Iowa, in 1876. By 1882, Garland was living in Illinois, but after just two years, he relocated to Boston, Massachusetts, where in 1885, he was hired at the Boston School of Oratory. This move would define the rest of his lifelong struggle, both to identify as a Midwestern writer and to hold that identity at a distance. While he had some publishing exposure prior to 1889, that year was when he began publishing in earnest. He would go on to publish over fifty books, the last of which appeared in 1939. Most notable was his Pulitzer Prize in biography for A Daughter of the Middle Border, a 1921 book that was second in a series of family histories. The award-winning book took a hard and realistic look at Garland’s family life. Some of his later work went on to serve as a call for reform toward the treatment of Native Americans and the riparian land of the Midwest and West. However, he framed the call to action within formulaic romances and thus suffered criticism for abandoning his talents in literary realism. More recently, scholars have argued that Garland’s shifting between genres should be not be criticized; they argue he was only doing what any talented writer seeking an income in the early 20th-century publishing market would do. A 2008 memoir by his daughter, Isabel Garland Lord, also stands in support of Garland’s artistic decisions, which earned him financial stability and a steady circuit of lectures and publishing. He never returned to the Midwest, and lived out his final years in Los Angeles, California, where he was drawn to Hollywood. There, he maintained strong relationships with influential writers at home and abroad, earning him the informal title of The Dean of American Letters. His final writing projects departed even further from literary realism; he delved into the paranormal, such as the purported power of buried objects. This attempt at making a name for himself in the realm of the paranormal did not pay off (even 21st-century scholars do not make much of these later books), and for many years he remained in the shadow of more eminent American writers. He can be credited, however, as a prolific writer and lecturer who succeeded in three areas—validating American realism at a time when the fad was to romanticize the rural life, showcasing the Midwest as a place of profound struggle and beauty, and documenting the American way of life as seen by a conscientious critic. He died in Hollywood of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 4, 1940, at the age of 79. He was buried with his parents in Neshonoc Cemetery in his hometown of West Salem, Wisconsin.