"the Supremacy of Equal Rights": the Struggle against Racial Discrimination in Antebellum Massachusetts and the Foundations of the Fourteenth Amendment

• Professor of History and Social Science, California Institute of Technology. Ph.D., Yale University (History). An earlier version of this paper was delivered in 198S at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, D.C. Research was partially supponed by the Wilson Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the California Institute of Technology. This Article is part of a book tentatively titled The Onward Marc:h of R ight Principles, on which the author has been working since 1976. The larger work will treat coun cases and state laws on racial discrimination in schools from 1834 to 1903. Project research has focused on twenty-two states and the District of Columbia. Several articles to be included in the book are already published or will soon be published. See infra note 29. Several friends have given me very helpful comments or advice: Les Benedict, Mary Berry, Dan Lowenstein, William Nelson, John Phillip Reid, Doug Rivers, Mark Tushnet, and Bill Wiecek. Their cooperation does not neces.sarily imply agreement with what I did not change in the paper. I also thank a number of people for alening me to relevant sources: for R. Madsen's unpublished paper regarding segregation in the Albany, New York, public schools, Jack Reynolds; see supra note 2S9; for leads and materials regarding the Nantucket effort to integrate schools, Pat Church, clerk of the Nantucket Superior Court, Amy Jenness, a reponer for the <Ape Cod Times, Isabel KaldenbachMontmayor, and Barbara Linebaugh White; see supra notes 96-105. 1 Printed in The (Boston) Liberator, Sept. 7, 1849, at 143, col. I. Citations below to page numbers in The Liberator appear as both continuous-page and issue-page citations.