and regarded as colored children by the community wherein they resided, should not be, as of right, entitled to admission into white schools.[23] In 1841, it had been held that a youth of Negro, Indian, and white blood, but of more than half white blood, was entitled to the benefit of the school fund.
In Indiana,[24] in 1850, the public school law provided for a tax levy for the support of the schools, but omitted "all Negroes and mulattoes" from the tax list. Some colored children applied for admission, not as beneficiaries of the public school fund, but offering to pay their own tuition. The court[25] of that State held that they could not be received if the resident parents of white children attending or desiring to attend the school objected, saying: "This [the exclusion of the colored children] has not been done because they do not need education, nor because their wealth was such as to render aid undesirable, but because black children were deemed unfit associates of white, as school companions. Now, surely, this reason operates with equal force against such children attending the schools at their own, as at the public expense."
In the case of Roberts v. The City of Boston,[26] which was argued before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1849, in which Charles Sumner was counsel for the plaintiff, the court gives the following interesting information: "The colored population of Boston constitute less than one sixty-second part of the entire population of the city. For half a century, separate schools have been kept in Boston for colored children, and the primary school for colored children in Belknap street was established in 1820, and has been kept there ever since. The teachers of this
