Morgan v. Hennigan Segregation Complaint

This document is the first page of the complaint in the case file for Morgan v. Hennigan, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in 1972.

The 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka found that segregation denied Black children equal protection under the law. While attention was mostly directed at the de jure segregation of the southern United States, the de facto segregation of the north—and Boston— would also come into focus. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fought this segregation throughout the 1960s against stiff resistance from the Boston Public School system and white Bostonians. On March 14, 1972, the NAACP filed a suit against the Boston School Committee with Tallulah Morgan named as the lead plaintiff. James Hennigan, the chair of the school committee, was listed as the main defendant. The decision by Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. came in 1974, effectively desegregating Boston schools.

View and download the Tallulah Morgan et al. v. James W. Hennigan et al. Complaint on our online Catalog. This record is one example of the many records held in Civil Action Case Files in the National Archives at Boston, Massachusetts. You can explore more records held at the National Archives at Boston by visiting our online Catalog or by visiting the National Archives at Boston, Massachusetts. This record is located within Record Group 21: District Courts of the United States, Series: Tallulah Morgan et al v. James W.  Hennigan et al Civil Action Case File #72-0911. Many of the records in this collection have yet to be digitized. We encourage researchers to visit us onsite to explore these records and learn more about the archival collections held in the National Archives at Boston.