ABSTRACT
On the 7th of May, 1844, city blacks first officially petitioned the Boston School Committee asking that separate schools be abandoned and that their children be allowed to attend the regular public schools. The great principle of voluntarism in the American church tradition has always been something of an endorsement for separatism; but the tax-supported public school system has had no such rationale. Public schools were "supported by, designed for, and opened to the whole public equally. The reports by School Committee members in 1849 were the last they would be required to prepare. The legislature of Massachusetts, bowing to the sovereignty of the Constitution, "has made no discrimination of color or race, in the establishment of Public Schools." In March 1850 Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, himself a former member of the Boston School Committee, ruled on the legality of separate schools.
