The little-known, but dramatic tale of Nantucket's African-American community, which organized and fought one of the nation's first battles for school integration and challenged Massachusetts law. It was a fight that captured the attention of anti-slavery leaders, including Frederick Douglass who launched his career on Nantucket in 1841. In the early 1800s, blacks found refuge from slavery among the island's white Quakers, and prospered in what was then the center of the world's whaling industry and one of the wealthiesttowns in America. Captain Absalom F. Boston owned and captained the all African-American ship, The Industry, yet, like every other black Nantucketer, lived in a segregated section of the island. In the early 1920s, Boston helped to found the African Meeting House, a church and a schoolhouse for black children, and was instrumental in the passage of a groundbreaking equal education law in 1845 which desegregated most of Massachusetts schools.