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rights through his role in the Sarah Roberts school integration case. Roberts had been pro- hibited from attending a white public school that was considerably closer to her home than the segregated black school provided by the public school system. Roberts came from a family of black activists: her grandfather had pub- lished books, and her father was a writer who had published a short- lived black newspaper. Her father had somehow successfully enrolled her in one of the white schools but when the authorities discovered this, they sent police to remove her. Morris represented


the girl in court, but the suit was denied by the Suffolk County Court of Pleas. An abolitionist judge, who had been appointed to the state supreme court, advised Morris to make an appeal. Charles Sumner, a close friend of Loring and a future U.S. Senator, was asked to join the plaintiff’s legal team. At the time, Morris was less than two years removed from passing his bar exam and despite his confi- dence, he recognized that presenting a case before the state’s highest court—whose chief justice at that time, Lemuel Shaw, was among the most intimidating and influential state judges in American history—was no small task. Te Roberts case brought together what is believed to have been the first interracial legal team to argue a brief. Morris framed the facts of the case for the court and


Sumner followed with the legal and philosophical under- pinnings of their argument. For Sumner, it boiled down to the issue of “equality before the law,” a term which had earlier been used by Loring during a state committee hear- ing on segregation in public transportation, and with which


JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2011 DIVERSITY & THE BAR®


Morris was undoubt- edly familiar. Shaw’s decision,


while agreeing with the axiom of equal- ity before the law, presented a convo- luted argument that resulted in the legal doctrine of “separate but equal.” Te Boston Public Schools had the right to segregate the schools, he concluded, so long as they pro- vided equivalent facilities to blacks. Nevertheless, segrega- tion of the Boston Public Schools ended in 1855 after a recom- mendation by the city government. Te Roberts Case


was later used as the foundation for the


separate but equal doctrine in the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the practice of Jim Crow. Tat ruling was not overturned until the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision. Turgood Marshall, who argued for Brown, used many of the arguments presented by Sumner and Morris in the Roberts Case to win his landmark case. During the Civil War, Morris was instrumental in


recruiting black soldiers for the Union army. Afterwards, he became prosperous by representing the railroad industry. Morris died in 1882 at the age of 59, a man whose boldness in the face of injustice continues to reverberate. D&B


1 Kendrick, Stephen, and Paul Kendrick. Sarah’s Long Walk: the Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America. Boston:


Beacon, 2004. Print. 2


3 Kendrick, Stephen, and Paul Kendrick. Sarah’s Long Walk: the Free Blacks Roberts v. Boston, 59 Mass. (5 Cush.) 198 (1850).


of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America. Boston: Beacon, 2004. Print.


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