Sarah Roberts, Robert Morris & Charles Sumner

In 1848 the printer Benjamin Roberts sued Boston after his five-year-old daughter Sarah was denied a nearby white school and forced to walk past it to a distant, underfunded Black one. His attorneys — Robert Morris, one of the first Black lawyers in the U.S., and Charles Sumner — lost in 1849, and the ruling became the origin of "separate but equal," later cited in Plessy v. Ferguson. But the fight continued, and in 1855 Massachusetts became the first state to ban school segregation by law. Part of the Black Heritage Trail story.