1
Stephen Kendrick & Paul Kendrick , Sarah ’ s Long Walk : The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America ( 2004 ), 28 .
2
David McCullough , The Greater Journey : Americans in Paris ( 2011 ), 131 .
3
For more on Morris and his fellow civil-rights activists in Boston , see Rosalyn Delores Elder , African American Heritage in Massachusetts : Exploring the Legacy ( Boston , 2016 ), 45 – 48 ; 138 .
Charles Sumner , the object of Ms . Anderson ’ s admiration ( and ours ), was born in Boston in 1811 and died in Washington , D . C ., in 1874 . His life might have followed the familiar groove of the dominant Boston families — Harvard College with optional Harvard Law supplement , marriage within the acceptable circles , respectable career followed by burial at Mount Auburn — but for a trip to Paris that he took in the 1830s . He was a young , impressionable college graduate then , hoping to see some art and monuments and to improve his foreign languages . He accomplished all that , as did many young men like him in those days . But unlike most of them , he was able to see and feel what was different in Europe , and to wonder why it was so .
As David McCullough has written in The Greater Journey , Sumner , while attending classes at the Sorbonne in Greek philosophy , noted with astonishment that among the student audience were several fashionably dressed Black men . These men were not only following the same rigorous course of instruction as their white peers but were on terms of social ease with them . No white Frenchman expected separate seating or the banishment of the Black students from the lecture hall , which would have been routine and reflexive in the United States . In the New England of Sumner ’ s youth , although slavery had been abolished , racial segregation — in education , transportation , housing , employment , entertainment , and worship — was the norm . Regardless of income , Black citizens had to ride in unheated railway carriages and sit in designated sections in church ; Wendell Phillips , later a great voice for the abolition of slavery , remembered chasing Black boys off of Boston Common by throwing rocks at them . 1 The absence of these restrictions in Paris society made a deep impression on Sumner . “[ The Black students ] were standing in the midst of a knot of young men , and their color seemed to be no objection to them .… It must be then ,” he wrote in his journal , “ that the distance between free blacks and whites among us [ Americans ] is derived from education , and does not exist in the nature of things .” 2 This single break from his socialization was to have a dramatic effect on his life , his friendships , and his career .
Back in Boston , he attended Harvard Law School and qualified as an attorney . He began to open his door professionally and socially to some of the brilliant individuals who were fighting not only the institution of slavery but that of racism . One of them was Robert Morris ( 1823 – 1882 ), a native of Salem who was the first African-American to pass the Massachusetts bar . 3
In 1847 , Morris had taken the case of a frustrated Black parent , Benjamin Roberts , who was a printer and editor by trade . 4 Roberts ’ s young daughter Sarah had to walk many blocks from her home in Boston ’ s North End to attend a “ colored ” school on Beacon Hill , passing on her way several schools that were reserved for white children . Morris was then very new to lawyering and it was not a great surprise when Sarah ’ s case ( Roberts v . City of Boston ) lost in the lower court . Morris then approached Charles Sumner for help in drafting an appeal .
4
4
Benjamin F . Roberts is buried in the St . John Lot at Mount Auburn Cemetery .