nded persons that in cities of separate systems Negroes
would derive practically no benefit from the school tax which they
paid.

This agitation for the abolition of caste in the public schools
assumed its most violent form in Boston during the forties. The
abolitionists then organized a more strenuous opposition to the caste
system. Why Sarah Redmond and the other children of a family paying
tax to support the schools of Boston should be turned away from a
public school simply because they were persons of color was a problem
too difficult for a fair-minded man.[1] The war of words came,
however, when in response to a petition of Edmund Jackson, H.J.
Bowditch, and other citizens for the admission of colored people to
the public schools in 1844, the majority of the school committee
refused the request. Following the opinion of Chandler, their
solicitor, they based their action of making distinction in the
public schools on the natural distinction of the races, which "no
legislature, no social customs, can efface," and which "renders a
promiscuous intermingling in the public schools disadvantageous both
to them and to the whites."[2] Questioned as to any positive law
providing for such discrimination, Chandler gave his opinion that the
School Committee of Boston, under the authority perhaps of the City
Council, had a legal right to establish and maintain special primary
schools for the blacks. He believed, too, that in the exercise of
their lawful discretionary power they could exclude white pupils from
certain schools and colored pupils from certain other schools when,
in their judgment, the best interests of all would thereby be
promoted.[3]

[Footnote 1: Wigham, _The Antislavery Cause in America_, p. 103.]

[Footnote 2: _Minority Report_, etc., p. 31.]

[Footnote 3: _Ibid_., p. 30.]

Encouraged by the fact that colored children were indiscriminately
admitted to the schools of Salem, Nantucket, New Bedford, and Lowell,
in fact, of every city in Massachusetts but Boston, the friends of
the colored people fearlessly attacked the false legal theories of
Solicitor Chandler. The minority of the School Committee argued that
schools are the common property of all, and that each and all are
legally entitled without "let or hindrance" to the equal benefits of
all advantages they might confer.[1] Any action, therefore, which
tended to restrict to any individual or class the advantages and
benefits designed for all, was an