Sarah's Long Walk
The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America
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In 1847, a five-year-old African American girl named Sarah Roberts was forced to walk past five white schools to attend the poor and densely crowded all-black Abiel Smith School on Boston's Beacon Hill. Incensed that his daughter had been turned away at each white school, her father, Benjamin, sued the city of Boston on her behalf. The historic case that followed set the stage for over a century of struggle, culminating in 1954 with the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
Paul Kendrick
Paul Kendrick is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, American Heritage, Talking Points Memo, and Huffington Post. He has coauthored with Stephen Kendrick Douglass and Lincoln: How a Revolutionary Black Leader and a Reluctant Liberator Struggled to End Slavery and Save the Union and Sarah's Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America.
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