Roberts v. City of Boston: 1848-49

Hearing the case was a bench headed by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, one of the nation's best-known and most influential judges. Shaw was hostile to slavery, and in fact he was the judge who had handed down the Aves decision on which Sumner was relying. But now, inexplicably, Shaw wrote an opinion that upheld both segregation and the General School Committee's decision.

He began by citing the same clauses in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights that Sumner had quoted, and that he himself had used in the Aves opinion to strike down slavery. It was true, he now wrote, that all persons were equal before the law. But that did not mean, he continued, that the law actually treated everyone equally, regardless of circumstance. He observed that men and women had different legal status; so, too, did adults and children. To these, Shaw added the third category of whites and blacks.

The General School Committee, Shaw held for a unanimous court, had plenary power to administer the school system as it wished, and the court should not interfere. In this instance, he found, the committee had decided "that the good of both classes of schools will be best promoted" by a segregated system, which was a reasonable decision. To Sumner's claim that this created a caste system, Shaw replied that the true source of that system was actually prejudice. "This prejudice," wrote Shaw, "is not created by law, and probably cannot be changed by law." If prejudice existed, the chief justice concluded, then forcing white and black children to associate in integrated schools would do nothing to eliminate it.

Shaw even discounted the Robertses' objection to the extra distance that Sarah had to walk as utterly trivial. "In Boston," he pointed out, "more than one hundred thousand inhabitants live within a space so small … it would be scarcely an inconvenience to require a boy of good health to traverse daily the whole extent of it." In light of this, he concluded, the extra distance that Sarah had to walk did nothing to make the committee's decision "unreasonable, still less illegal." With that, the court dismissed the Robertses' case.

Six years later, the Massachusetts legislature abolished segregated schooling, but the damage had already been done. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, courts in other states, both North and South, cited the Roberts opinion to show that separate white and black school systems did not violate principles of equality before the law. In the infamous 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court cited Shaw's opinion, helping itself to many of his findings wholesale and giving the "separate but equal" doctrine federal constitutional sanction. Not until 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, did the Court change its mind, incorporating in that later opinion many of the same arguments that Charles Sumner had made in the Roberts case.