This black father won equal education for his daughter, 100 years before the Supreme Court’s ruling
Absalom Boston was an affluent whaling captain in Massachusetts
Absalom Boston wanted his daughter to go to school. Given a choice, the wealthy whaling captain would have liked her to go to the best school, but really any school would have done. But Boston and his daughter were black, and in 1856, the only school on Nantucket was for white students. Boston wouldn’t stand for that. So, nearly a decade before the Emancipation Proclamation, and a hundred years before Brown v. Board of Education, Absalom Boston desegregated the Massachusetts island’s education system, with the help of an unusual island community.
Boston came from a family of Nantucket whalers with a history of suing their way to justice. In 1773, his uncle Prince Boston, a slave, became the first man in Massachusetts to successfully sue for his freedom, winning back wages for his work on a whale ship. (When Prince Boston’s slavemaster threatened to appeal the ruling, a white Quaker, William Rotch, stated that he would hire John Adams to make Boston’s case, and the slavemaster let the matter drop). Prince Boston went on to captain black-owned whaling ships. His nephew Absalom Boston followed in his footsteps.
Black whaling communities like the one on Nantucket proved an unlikely bastion of racial justice. Whaling was one of the few industries in which black employees were evaluated based on their work, not their skin color, and could move through the ranks. Several black whalers became captains, in fact. In San Francisco, William T. Shorey would even become known as “the black Ahab.”
Some of this progressiveness can be explained by the industry’s unusual payment scheme. Everyone who worked the ship, from the cabin boy to the captain, took a percentage of the profits of whatever they brought back. This, combined with the treacherous conditions, fostered a sense of camaraderie among black and white crew members. In addition to the regular weather dangers of sailing the open seas, whaling posed unique threats, such as harpoon injuries. Whales were known to ram and sink vessels. It was a rare ship that made it back to port without an injury or a death. The risks were especially high for black seamen, who could be kidnapped and illegally sold back into the slave trade. As whaling became the fifth largest industry in the country, black families moved to Massachusetts in search of opportunity. During Boston’s day, the black population of Nantucket grew to five times its Revolutionary War-era size, becoming one of the few places where black families could have a modicum of wealth.
Whaling was lucrative. Ambergris, a wax-like substance found in whale intestines and used in perfumes and medicines, cost as much as the priciest pearls. Whale oil was used for everything from greasing machinery to lighting and could be found in soap and food. Boston went to sea for the first time at age 15, and he did well. By the time he was in his twenties, he had earned enough money to buy his first parcel of land. By the 1820s, he was the captain of an all-black whaling crew aboard the Industry. Boston quickly became a leader in Nantucket’s black community, which was centered in the African Meeting House, one of the first black institutions in the country.
But the whalers’ elevated social standing at sea didn’t translate to land. The white Quakers who dominated Nantucket politics were abolitionists, but this didn’t mean they wanted black people to be their peers exactly. As the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities explains, “The success and self-respect attained by the island’s black whalers made them unwilling to tolerate the inferior, segregated schools their children were forced to attend.”
The black Nantucket whalers had money and consensus about school desegregation. In 1840, the African Meeting House’s star pupil, Eunice Ross, applied to attend Nantucket’s only high school and was denied by the School Committee. Then, in 1842, the schools were desegregated for a day before white groups organized to reverse the ruling. Black community leaders published a strongly worded letter about the white islanders’ prejudice in response. Town and School Committee meetings were becoming increasingly acrimonious. Petitions and counter petitions were signed. Pro-integration leaders of the School Committee were voted out by the white residents.
In 1845, Massachusetts passed a bill requiring the state to provide public education for all students regardless of race. Since the white high school was Nantucket’s only high school, the whalers now had grounds to sue. In 1846, when the school denied Boston’s daughter Phebe entrance, he announced his plans to sue on her behalf and on Eunice Ross’s. The city of Nantucket knew a court battle would be expensive, and because of his wealth, Boston would be able to sustain the fight. And considering the new state law, there was a good chance they would lose. Before he could file suit, the town of Nantucket agreed to desegregate their schools. Ross, who was 24 by that time, was admitted to the ninth grade.
It was a community-wide win that could have been much wider. Had Boston’s lawsuit actually been filed, it would have become case law for similar cases in Massachusetts, setting a precedent that might have allowed others to sue and integrate area schools if — and it’s a big if — they could get a lawyer and access to a fair trial. Regardless, Boston’s efforts existed in a rare window in history in an uncommon community. It was this perfect combination of time, place, and circumstance that allowed him to prevail — and it would prove difficult to replicate.
Boston died rich, with three homes, a store, and considerable land holdings. But whaling didn’t last long on Nantucket. The cotton mill and the oil refinery replaced the harpoon as the next big American industry when American whalers couldn’t compete with their cheaper Norwegian counterparts. With it went one of the few upwardly mobile career paths for black families. Without a fair way to make a living, the thriving community disintegrated as, one by one, black families left Nantucket.
