Race-neutral Individualism and Resurgence of the Color Line: Massachusetts Civil Rights Legislation, 1855–1895

KAZUTERU OMORI

IN 1855, THE MASSACHUSETTS legislature passed an act providing that "[i]n determining the qualifications of scholars to be admitted into any public school or any district school in this Commonwealth, no distinction shall be made on account of the race, color or religious opinions, of the applicant or scholar." After the Civil War, Republican assemblymen in the Bay State took a step further by enacting and reinforcing laws against racial discrimination in public accommodations. Massachusetts at the end of the nineteenth century was a state with the most potent civil rights laws in the nation. Nonetheless, social and economic conditions of black Bay Staters did not change much, and even deteriorated in the Hub city, especially after the turn of the century as contemporary observers and later historians have noted. Boston, the capital of the Commonwealth and "the paradise of the Negro," where African Americans could enjoy the same political and civil rights as whites, became in the twentieth century a city having "a massive and highly segregated black ghetto" with "most of the negative social attributes identified with ghetto life." The existing literature, however, almost unanimously regards the desegregation act of 1855 as one of the most glorious victories in the antebellum North by and for free people of color and the post-bellum civil rights enactment as a sign of ameliorating race relations. So did the majority of the black leadership.