ABSTRACT
In 1846 a sub-committee of the Primary School Committee and three years later a special committee of the Grammar School Board—the two agencies with plenary oversight of public education in Boston—issued two long reports in response to petitions from black parents opposed to exclusive schools. Intellectual catatonia of this sort was an obvious vulnerability in the School Committee's argument, but there was no explaining away a central fact: the establishment of Boston's racially separate school system was desired by, worked for, and, in part, paid by, blacks themselves. The intermediate school continued in one of the lower rooms of the grammar school and thus remained under the direction of the Primary School Committee. By the mid 1830's, the modest request made by blacks a generation earlier for a school of their own had grown into a three-tiered system of publicly supported segregated schools.
