Sarah's Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America

In the fall of 1848, a five-year-old African American girl named Sarah Roberts walked past five white schools to attend the poor and densely crowded all-black Abiel Smith School on Boston’s Beacon Hill. Her father, Benjamin Roberts, decided to sue the city to end this injustice. The historic court 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.

“A carefully framed, evocative portrait of the middle-class black community that had been ensconced on Beacon Hill since Revolutionary times . . . New depth in the legacy of America’s struggle for equal rights.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The authors handle the weighty issue of desegregation with skill; this is a book for historians and humanitarians.” —Publishers Weekly

“Supremely gifted historians in every respect, Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick have given us an exceptionally full and compelling account of the antebellum struggle for racial equality in the nation’s ‘Birthplace of Liberty.’” —James Brewer Stewart, author of Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery