Here is a grievance which, independent of any stigma from color, calls for redress. It is an inequality which the Constitution and the Laws of Massachusetts repudiate. But it is not on the ground of inconvenience only that it is odious. And this brings me to the next head.
SEPARATE SCHOOLS ARE IN THE NATURE OF CASTE.
The separation of children in the Schools, on account of race or color, is in the nature of _Caste_, and, on this account, a violation of Equality. The case shows expressly that the child was excluded from the school nearest to her dwelling--the number in the school at the time warranting her admission--"on the sole ground of color." The first Majority Report presented to the School Committee, and mentioned in the statement of facts, presents the grounds of this discrimination with more fulness, saying, "It is one of _races_, not of _colors_ merely. The distinction is one which the All-wise Creator has seen fit to establish; and it is founded deep in the physical, mental, and moral natures of the two races. No legislation, no social customs, can efface this distinction."[30] Words cannot be chosen more apt than these to describe the heathenish relation of Caste.
[30] Report to the Primary School Committee, June 15, 1846, on the Petition of Sundry Colored Persons for the Abolition of the Schools for Colored Children, p. 7.
This term, which has its prototype in Spanish and French, finds its way into English from the Portuguese _casta_, which signifies family, breed, race, and is generally used to designate any hereditary distinction, particularly of race. It is most often employed in India, and it is there that we must go to understand its full force. A recent English writer says, that it is "not only a distinction by birth, but is founded on the doctrine of an essentially distinct origin of the different races, which are thus unalterably separated."[31] This is the very ground of the Boston School Committee.
This word is not now for the first time applied to the distinction between the white and black races. Alexander von Humboldt, speaking of the negroes in Mexico, characterizes them as a caste.[32] Following him, a recent political and juridical writer of France uses the same term to denote not only the distinctions in India, but those of our own country, especially referring to the exclusion of colored children from the Common Schools as among "the humiliating and brutal distinctions" by which their caste is characterized.[33] It is, then, on authority and reason alike that we apply this term to the hereditary distinction on account of color now established in the schools of Boston.