Melvin B. Miller

“For decades, Boston’s black citizens petitioned the school board for fair treatment but to no avail. Finally, in 1787, Boston blacks demanded that the state legislature provide alternative education opportunities for blacks—a campaign to establish the concept of racially separate schools. Boston’s so-called “free schools” did not benefit black children. As might be expected, the legislature refused their request even though this was 152 years after public schools were established in Boston with the founding of Boston Latin School. Black boys and girls had endured incessant bullying and harassment in the public schools. So, contrary to the petition for integrated schools in the Brown v. Board of Education case that was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1954, Boston blacks sought all-black schools 167 years earlier. This is historically the first time in the nation that blacks tried to separate from whites in schools.”
― Melvin B. Miller, Boston’S Banner Years: 1965–2015: A Saga of Black Success

“The problems of the 1960s were not simply a case of history repeating itself from the racial discrimination in Boston of black students in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When such racial discrimination became illegal in 1855, public officials complied, and black and white students were able to attend class together. That state law is still valid. However, the 1855 state statute and the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education were both insufficient to deter Boston’s bigoted School Committee in the mid-twentieth century.”
― Melvin B. Miller, Boston’S Banner Years: 1965–2015: A Saga of Black Success