The First Step: How One Girl Put Segregation on Trial

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Plot

In 1847, a young African American girl named Sarah Roberts was attending a school in Boston. Then one day she was told she could never come back. She didn't belong. The Otis School was for white children only. Sarah deserved an equal education, and the Roberts family fought for change. They made history. Roberts v. City of Boston was the first case challenging our legal system to outlaw segregated schools. It was the first time an African American lawyer argued in a supreme court. [1]

In 1847, four-year-old Sarah Roberts began attending her neighborhood school, the Otis School, “one of Boston’s best.” Her parents’ quiet defiance of the laws that kept black and white children apart was soon noticed and Sarah was escorted home by a policeman. Recalling his own childhood journey across town to the Smith School for African American children, “a school that only owned one book,” Sarah’s father, Benjamin Roberts engaged the second African American lawyer in the United States, Robert Morris, to take the battle to the courtroom. Morris was joined by anti-slavery advocate Charles Sumner in a packed courtroom to plead Sarah’s case and, by extension, for the rights of “every other African American child in Boston.” The case was lost, but, together, Sarah, her family, this African American and white lawyer team, and the community of Boston had taken “the first step” toward change.

Through activism across the state, they achieved their goal in 1855, when the legislature voted to integrate schools throughout Massachusetts. The final images of the book bring readers a century forward to the 1954 Supreme Court Case, Brown v. the Board of Education, and Goodman’s reminder that the slam of the gavel echoed with the “sound of Sarah’s first steps to school. [2]