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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 40, no. 3 (Fall 1992), p. 59-62

The Integration of Nantucket Public Schools
By Barbara White

The trouble began in 1840 when Eunice Ross, a student in the African School, was denied admittance to the high school after passing the entrance examination.

Nantucket is responsible for what is thought to be the first civil rights bill in the United States guaranteeing equal access to education. The law, passed in 1845, ensured the right to sue should any child in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts be "unlawfully excluded from any public school." The legislation was the result of a dramatic series of events on Nantucket that included riots, a school boycott, lawsuits, and petitions to the State House.

On the surface, it seems natural that Nantucket, with its Quaker roots, would play a role in pre-Civil War integration struggles and be responsible for such a law. Nantucketer Elihu Coleman's 1729 tract against slavery was the second abolitionist treatise to be published in the colonies, and seaman Prince Boston was the first slave freed in Massachusetts as a result of jury verdict when he successfully sued for his whaling lay in 1770. In 1822, town officials dramatically protected runaway slaves Arthur and Mary Cooper when slave catchers arrived with legal documents to take them back to Virginia. Prominent white citizens, such as Oliver Gardner, hid the fugitives for a week. Anna, Olivier's daughter, would play a major role in the upcoming drama.

Despite the evidence, abolitionists were in the minority and Nantucket was a segregated community. By 1820 African-Americans numbered 274 in a population of 7,266. Those statistics remained stable throughout the next decade. Most blacks lived in a section called "New Guinea" in the vicinity of lower Pleasant Street. New Guinea had its own churches, stores, graveyard, and anti-slavery society.

By 1825 there was a segregated public elementary school in the African Baptist Church, located on York Street at Five Corners. This was the first year that Nantucket complied with the 1789 state law requiring towns to provide public schools. It took the agitation of editor Samuel Jenks of the Inquirer and his brother-in-law Cyrus Peirce to persuade the Town to establish a public school system. The African School was one of the five schools established.

Most island children were educated in private schools, and public school was regarded as suitable for the poor only. During that first year 180 pupils were supported at public expense. But a system educating the poor only was not what a public school system was intended to do, so Jenks filed a complaint with the state's attorney general stating that Nantucket continued to violate the law. An indictment was brought against Nantucket and the legislature put new muscle into the law by fixing fines for noncompliance. Sensing a losing battle, Nantucket set up fully funded public elementary schools in 1827. They included the African School, which educated up to fifty students during its existence. However, a public high school did not open until 1838.

The trouble began in 1840 when 17-year-old Eunice Ross, a pupil in the African School, passed the high school entrance examination along with seventeen white pupils and asked for admittance. She had undoubtedly been encouraged by her teacher of four years, Anna Gardner. Eunice was denied entry to the school.

In June 1840 the first formal move toward admitting her was made on the floor of Town Meeting when Edward Gardner moved, "To see if the Town will instruct the School Committee to permit coloured children to enter all or any of the public schools of this Town." The motion failed.

In the school committee's report to the town the next year, it was reported that the "typical progress" of a pupil was "through the Introductory Schools ... to Grammar, and thence to the High School, by an access available to every scholar who has ability and perseverance." This was, however, a pattern open only to white students. The school committee conceded as much by recommending that the next school committee establish "some plan, whereby the higher branches of education may be communicated to the children of the coloured population, as fully and as satisfactorily, as to those of the white citizens." No plan was specified and education remained segregated.

Meanwhile, Anna Gardner vacated her teaching post at that controversial juncture, and there is no record of a successor or why she resigned. However, four months later a newspaper advertisement solicited males only to apply for her job.

The year following Eunice Ross's denial of admittance to the high school was an active one for island abolitionists, but it was also a year in which segregation became more entrenched. The Atheneum, both a meeting hall and town library, was closed to African-Americans. In response, Obed Macy opened a library and reading room for them over his Main Street store. The Women's Anti-Slavery Society refused to meet at the North Congregational Church when the church barred black women from its premises. In the summer a three-day Anti-Slavery Convention, held at the Atheneum Hall, attracted off-island speakers such as William Lloyd Garrison. Here Frederick Douglass made his stirring first speech to a white audience and was hired as an anti-slavery lecturer. Local abolitionists who addressed the convention included Anna Gardner, Nathaniel Barney, Andrew and Peter Macy, Isaac and Charlotte Austin, and David Joy.

In 1842 the integration issue heated up considerably. On the second day of Town Meeting a motion made by out-going school committee chairman Nathaniel Barney to integrate the schools was passed. This would have allowed Eunice Ross to enter the high school. It was a brief victory because the next day the town reconsidered its vote and it was overturned.

Both integrationists and segregationists tried to get their advocates on the new school committee; 59 people ran for 13 positions! An unprecedented six blacks ran as well, but only one, Edward J. Pompey, garnered more than two votes.(He received 55 votes, not enough for election.) Most of the prominent abolitionists, including Andrew and Isaac Macy, David Joy, and Isaac Austin, lost their positions in town government. John H. Shaw and Nathaniel Barney narrowly retained their seats, whereas outspoken segregationist William Starbuck received a hefty 600 votes.

Shortly thereafter a group of angry blacks met at Zion Church to discuss the results of the Town Meeting, which had briefly voted in favor of integration and then changed its mind. Two motions were passed. The first said, "...it is the judgement of the oppressed portion of the citizens of Nantucket, that it is their right, and they ought to claim, and do desire to enjoy, among other rights, the right of having their youth educated in the same schools which are common to the more favored members of this community." The second thanked those who had spoken on behalf of equal education.

The black integrationists also wrote to the school committee and to the citizens of Nantucket a remarkable and lengthy address that was printed in both newspapers. It said that the vote to continue segregation of the public schools was not "a recent wound . . . but a wound of some years standing." They reminded the town "We are by the Constitution and laws acknowledged to be citizens and consequently entitled to all rights and privileges in common with other citizens, and then that for a mere accident, the difference of complexion, we are denied the right of privilege of education . . . ." The address was never answered.

That summer, emotions exploded during the August Anti-slavery Convention, called for August 10. Again, it was well attended by influential off-island abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Stephen S. Foster, C. Lenox Redmond, and Frederick Douglass. To the issues of segregation, public education, abolitionism, and desegregation Foster added his denunciation of America's churches, several of them existing on Nantucket, which further inflamed local residents and the clergy. Convention sessions, interrupted by riots, dissension, stones, brickbats, and rotten eggs, moved from the Atheneum Hall, to Franklin Hall, and finally to Town Hall, as well as to boatbuilders George and Reuben Coffin's Big Shop on the outskirts of town. On the evening of August 15 the abolitionists canceled what remained of their agenda. They left the island and returned the following June to sessions calm and unremarkable. However, the tensions they had raised would surface over local issues.

The following year, 1843, was equally explosive. At Town Meeting, Nathaniel Barney repeatedly moved to integrate the school system, but was thwarted by an amendment to one of his own motions made by William Starbuck "that the African School be continued as heretofore," which passed. Two days later the issue was brought up again. This time the abolitionists, hoping to shift the debate to fiscal ground, persuaded the voters to delete the African School's funding. That led to a reading of the "Minority Report to the Financial Report" of the town, which dealt almost exclusively with the issue of the African School. It claimed that the appropriation was wasteful and contrary "to the spirit of the law" and called for its closure with the students redistributed among the other public schools. The report's recommendations were not accepted, although the town had already voted to withdraw the African School's appropriation.

Not willing to accept defeat, however, abolitionists quickly drew up six articles requiring a Special Town Meeting several days later. They attempted to draw attention to the foolishness of segregation by asking "To see if the town will establish a School for all Children having Red Hair." Several days of motions and countermotions followed, including one to allow qualified students to be moved to other schools at the school committee's discretion. However, William Starbuck persuaded the town to continue the status quo and successfully moved to postpone further discussion of school matters for the duration of the meeting. That left the African School without funding, which then had to be voted at yet another Town Meeting.

At that meeting the radicals had enough school committee support to integrate the schools, regardless of Town Meeting votes. It resulted in a contentious five-day Special Town Meeting in March as the segregationists tried to block their efforts. William Starbuck, also on the school committee, moved that members of the school committee who would not comply with the town's wishes should resign.

But the school committee had no intention of resigning and proceeded to integrate Nantucket's schools as if the meeting had never occurred. The African School was renamed York Street School and designated for primary school children in the neighborhood. Fifty-one children, regardless of color, were placed there in September. Other black children were admitted to primary schools in other parts of the island, based on proximity to their homes.

Presumably, Eunice Ross took a seat in the high school, but it is not documented. According to that year's school committee report, fifteen African-Americans were placed in predominantly white schools in their neighborhoods. The committee reported that the placements had been successful and victoriously pronounced that segregation was "swept away into the great sea of bygone follies. ..." They could not have been more wrong.

Reaction came in no uncertain terms during the Town Meeting of 1844. Abolitionists were swept from positions on town committees as citizens expressed their anger at having been ignored. Segregationist William Starbuck was re-elected to the school committee, this time with people who supported his views. The town refused to accept the school committee report of the previous year and made it clear that integration would come to an end. The new school committee chose Monday, April 21, as the date to remove "colored children from the public schools to that in York Street." A special Town Meeting was called on the Friday before the removal date as ardent abolitionists, white and nonwhite, made passionate pleas to stave off the plan. But they failed and the town instructed "the School Committee to place the exclusion on the grounds of color and make their record to that effect."

Rather than send their children back to the segregated school, a boycott was organized by the African-American community. There is some evidence that a few whites also withdrew their children from the public schools in support of the boycott. The boycott was so successful that the school committee was forced to send white children to the York Street School in order to keep it open. Interestingly, it became an integrated school attended by a handful of black children.

At the same time, legal counsel was sought, but the African-American committee was told that it had no redress through the courts.

As the boycott dragged on from the end of the 1844 school year and into 1845, several petitions to the State House were made in hopes of changing the law. The first was presented by Edward J. Pompey and 104 other black citizens of Nantucket. Without mentioning skin color or Nantucket, the petition claimed that children in the Commonwealth were being deprived of public education and that the legislature should ensure all children "their equal right to the schools."

Two weeks later, the State House received two petitions in support of Pompey's petition, signed by Peter Macy and 252 white citizens of Nantucket. Shortly thereafter, two more petitions arrived, 350 white Nantucketers who defended the African School as "excellent," stating that the only reason for the segregation on Nantucket was proximity to the school. It asked the legislature not to pass "untoward legislation." A sixth petition arrived written and signed by Eunice Ross. In firm and legible handwriting, she told how she had been refused admittance to the high school, despite being "amply qualified."

The result was House Bill No. 45, which was passed in less than a month. Nantucketers had changed the law.

That should have put the matter to rest, but it did not. A few weeks previously the town had reaffirmed its segregation stance and re-elected most of the school committee. The lone dissenter of the prior committee, George Folger, was unseated. The new law was simply disregarded, as the abolitionists had ignored the town vote of two years before. The schools were not integrated and Eunice Ross was still denied entry to the high school. The boycott continued.

Meanwhile, Phebe Boston, seventeen-year-old daughter of Absalom Boston, was also denied entry to any but the African School. Her father filed suit and a Special Town Meeting in September was convened to decide how the town would respond. John Shaw and Andrew Macy attempted to persuade the town to integrate to avoid the suit, but the town voted to fight the case. While everyone awaited the outcome, the case was delayed for over a year by a jurisdictional switch from the Court of Common Pleas to the Supreme Judicial Court.

The legislation so joyously received had done nothing to resolve the situation. Black children steadily trickled back into the African School as parents worried about depriving their children of education for so many months. The school committee's report to the town in January 1846 criticized those who kept their children out of school and accused the abolitionists of loving colored children more than their own. In overtly racist language it defended segregation and opposed offensive "social amalgamation." It praised itself for protecting the majority "from the odium" of mixing the races.

Few motions were offered by the abolitionists at the 1846 Town Meeting. There was a strange silence as they waited, certain of victory, for the Phebe Boston case to settle the matter. Surprisingly, however, a motion by John Shaw to strike three of the most inflammatory paragraphs from the school committee report passed.

More important, all thirteen members of the prior school committee lost their re-election bids and at least nine known integrationists were elected, including George Folger and Obed Barney. The new committee took this as a mandate to put the matter to rest, to comply with the new law, and to integrate the schools. Integration was immediately implemented, and the report to the town the following year reflects their success. Children "who had for some time been deprived of educational privileges, applied for admission into the several public schools in the section where they severally resided, and were duly admitted."

The public schools on Nantucket were integrated. Six years of frustration had elapsed since Eunice Ross had applied for entry to the high school. The African School was closed, deemed too small to maintain. The Boston case appears to have been dropped, as it disappeared from all court records as of July 1846. Eunice Ross, 24, was finally admitted to the high school along with Phebe Boston. She completed her schooling there, where, according to her obituary, she excelled in French. She lived the rest of her life on Nantucket and died in 1895 at the age of 72. Sadly, Phebe Boston died of dysentery at age 21. They are both buried in the segregated cemetery on Mill Hill, behind Nantucket Cottage Hospital.

Barbara White has taught Social Studies at the Nantucket High School for over twenty years. She received her M.A. at Boston University in African-American Studies. Her thesis on "The African School and the Integration of Nantucket Public Schools 1825-1847," was published in 1978.

Space requirements necessitate omitting footnotes and bibliographies for the feature articles; the original and complete papers have been placed in the NHA Research Center for reference.