He added that streetcar companies, although private, were in the business of serving the public. Thus they must, he said, “carry all respectable persons.”
He went on to point to a state statute—in other words, a law previously passed—that stated, “Colored persons, if sober, well-behaved, and free from disease, [have] the same rights as others.” They could not be excluded, he noted, by any rules governing the company. They could not be treated with force or violence. And if they were excluded or expelled from a streetcar, the company could be held responsible.
The judge’s instructions were very clear. A law that already existed in New York State supported Elizabeth Jennings and her position. In making a decision, the jurors needed to answer just one question: Did they believe Elizabeth and her witnesses?
A lawyer makes his case in this engraving of a courtroom scene from the 1800s.
TEN
The Jury’s Decision
ALL THEY COULD DO WAS WAIT.
Chester Arthur, Thomas Jennings, and of course Elizabeth Jennings herself would have been very apprehensive. They had planned for this moment and cared deeply about the outcome—not just for Elizabeth’s sake but for all black New Yorkers. But would the jurors, now deliberating privately in another room, take her side? Or would they do what jurors often did and fail to find justice for a black person?
No one can predict a jury’s decision. Composed of a group of ordinary people, local and state juries are often made up of between six and twelve members, depending on the rules of the individual court. Under oath and in secrecy, the jury discusses the facts of a case and decides the outcome based on the evidence and the law.
When the jury filed back into the courtroom, it meant a decision had been made. The head juror, selected by the others, was told to approach the bench and hand a slip of paper to the judge.
Judge Rockwell unfolded the paper. He read it and spoke. “The jury has awarded Miss Jennings $225 plus 10 percent for court costs,” he said.
She had won!
Chester Arthur had asked for the huge sum of five hundred dollars, but the amount she was awarded was still very surprising. Today, because of inflation, it would be close to six thousand dollars.
However, it was the exact words of Judge Rockwell, preserved forever in newspaper accounts, that mattered most to Elizabeth Jennings and her supporters. The strategy of Thomas Jennings and the church committee, carried out by Chester Arthur, had worked. The clear winners were the black residents of New York.
Judge Rockwell in his instructions had delivered words of justice long denied. By siding with Elizabeth Jennings, the jury confirmed the judge’s words.
“The streetcar companies must ‘carry all respectable persons.’”
“Colored persons [have] the same rights as others.”
Newspapers far and wide carried the story. A WHOLESOME VERDICT, reported the New-York Daily Tribune.
RIGHTS OF COLOURED PEOPLE VINDICATED, the National Anti-Slavery Standard’s headline all but shouted to the world.
LEGAL RIGHTS VINDICATED, Frederick Douglass declared in Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
This was a victory to be celebrated! The black community of New York, and beyond, was overjoyed. Whites who supported black equality were thrilled. The court victory was a boost in morale and a message of hope at a time when they were needed badly.
Elizabeth Jennings had arrived in court that morning knowing the odds were against her. She left a hero. As she made her way back to Manhattan, possibly walking across the ice-covered East River, perhaps she saw the city, her city, as a changed place, and in fact it was. From that moment on she had the right to ride on any streetcar she wanted. And so did everyone else.
The owners of the Third Avenue Railroad Company did not contest the decision but moved quickly to integrate their cars. Other streetcar companies soon followed their lead. The company owners understood that if they didn’t put a stop to segregation on their streetcars, there would be more incidents, and they would face similar lawsuits, which they would almost certainly lose, now that the court had sided with Elizabeth Jennings.
Some of the newspapers that published the jury’s decision. The Anti-Slavery Bugle, published in Ohio, was one of several newspapers that reprinted the original story from the National Anti-Slavery Standard.
Newspaper coverage of the jury’s decision. On this page, from left to right: National Anti-Slavery Standard (here, reprinted with a slightly different headline in the Anti-Slavery Bugle) and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Opposite page: The Pacific Appeal published an entire overview of the case, including an announcement of the verdict reprinted from the New-York Daily Tribune, in a retrospective published several years later.
In fact other segregated systems of transportation in New York City were affected by the ruling, too. “Railroads, steamboats, omnibuses, and ferry boats will be admonished* from this, as to the rights of respectable colored people,” the New-York Daily Tribune reported.
Progress is often accompanied by steps backward, so it’s not surprising that several incidents in which black riders encountered discrimination on the city’s streetcars were reported during the next two years. A few conductors still tried to discriminate against black riders. The official end to discrimination in transportation in New York City occurred with the passage of the New York State Civil Rights Act of 1873.
But Elizabeth Jennings’s success in court is considered by historians to be the first major breakthrough of its kind in New York.
The case had another positive result: Thomas Jennings was inspired to launch the Legal Rights Association, which would help black New Yorkers find and pay for attorneys to represent them in future cases.
As for Elizabeth, the court case catapulted her from an admired young teacher to a hero in the pursuit of equal rights for blacks. Black New Yorkers celebrated the anniversary of her court victory for years. In so doing, they honored a remarkable woman, who, on her way to choir practice one Sunday afternoon, rose up against racism and won.
PART II
A FORGOTTEN HERO
Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955.
ELEVEN
An Uncanny Similarity to Rosa Parks
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AFTER ELIZABETH JENNINGS had her day in court, a forty-two-year-old black seamstress named Rosa Parks was removed from a segregated bus and arrested in Montgomery, Alabama. Mrs. Parks had refused to comply with a law that required her to move back from the first row of the “Colored” section when the area designated for whites was filled with passengers.
That incident, which occurred on December 1, 1955, was carefully and thoughtfully anticipated by Mrs. Parks and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Her actions spurred on the Montgomery bus boycott and were an important step toward ending segregation in Montgomery’s public transportation system, just as the Elizabeth Jennings case was in New York City.
Mrs. Parks would prove to be an enduring figure. Her dignity and courage would resonate throughout the world.
Rosa Parks became a legend.
Elizabeth Jennings was largely forgotten.
Why?
There may be several reasons. Elizabeth Jennings lived in an era before modern media. When Mrs. Parks made her heroic stand, the story was covered by daily newspapers, wire service reporters, photographers, radio, and television. Within a few hours Rosa Parks’s story and photo were distributed far and wide.
At far left, advertisements in a Louisiana newspaper in which slaves were offered for sale and rewards were posted for escaped slaves. The ads were reprinted with scathing commentary in the New-York Daily Tribune. At near left, an article in the next day’s edition of the Tribune, “Will Kansas be a Free or Slave State?”
Mrs. Parks also had the support and backing of the NAACP, which did not exist in the 1850s.
For its time the Elizabeth Jennings case was a significant story that received national attention through the writings of Fred
erick Douglass as well as Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune. The majority of newspapers in the United States, however, were focused on a more pressing issue, slavery. Would it continue in the South? Would the institution be kept out of Kansas? Was a civil war over the issue unavoidable?
During the same week Elizabeth Jennings was assaulted in New York for standing up for equal treatment, advertisements in southern newspapers offered slaves for sale and rewards for escaped slaves. In Louisiana a slave owner offered ten dollars for the capture and return of “Charles,” described as a “dark mulatto . . . about 13 years of age; 4 feet 3 to 5 inches high” and possibly heading to Mobile, Alabama, adding that he might have been trying to find his sister. Another advertisement offered for sale an entire group of slaves “consisting of Men, Women and Children,” with payment requested in cash.
Nearly four million black men, women, and children were enslaved in the South at the start of the Civil War in 1861. The rights of free black people in the North, estimated at about 226,000, were also a vital cause but may have seemed less urgent.
The newspapers that did cover the Elizabeth Jennings story as it was unfolding in 1854 and 1855 went out of business long ago. Historical copies, if they survive at all, are mostly stored at research institutions.
At the time I started researching this story, the only way to find these newspaper accounts was to scroll through old microfilm, microfiche, and dusty volumes of archived papers at libraries and historical institutions. Some of these sources are now available on the internet, but certainly not all of them.
The fact that Elizabeth Jennings is a common name very likely contributed to her story’s near disappearance. A popular name makes research more difficult. Elizabeth Jennings shares her name with countless people around the world, including an English poet who died in 2001.
Additionally, it seems possible that the assault and court case faded from the news because Elizabeth Jennings herself did little to keep the story alive. Perhaps she wanted to forget about the experience, or maybe she simply wanted to get back to doing what she loved most, which was teaching.
Sometimes it is difficult to explain why one person becomes famous while others simply vanish from history. This is part of what makes history so fascinating. There are always new stories to be discovered.
At other times a story is untold for what turns out to be a very specific reason. That is what happened to Claudette Colvin, a teenager who took a stand on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 2, 1955, nine months prior to Rosa Parks. The city’s black leaders felt that Claudette Colvin was an unfit role model and chose Mrs. Parks instead. When Phillip Hoose wrote Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, readers finally learned about her courage and the significant case in which she testified.
In the case of Elizabeth Jennings, more than 160 years have passed since she stood up for her rights on a New York City streetcar. One wonders what she would think about her story being told now. How would she tell her story if she could tell it herself? Fortunately we know the answer, at least partially, to that question. Because she wrote down an account of the events of July 16, 1854, her words live on. In a sense, within the pages of this book, she has spoken for herself.
Burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum during the Draft Riots of 1863. Illustration courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.
TWELVE
What Happened to Elizabeth Jennings?
ELIZABETH JENNINGS WAS A HERO in the eyes of the black community as well as white supporters of equal rights for blacks, but there were hard times ahead.
In 1859, four years after her victory in court, her beloved father died at the age of sixty-eight. He did not live to see the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, or the end of slavery in the United States.
A year after Thomas Jennings died, Elizabeth married a man named Charles Graham, a native of St. Croix, one of three islands that today constitute the U.S. Virgin Islands. Two years after they married, Elizabeth and Charles were blessed with the birth of a baby boy. He was named Thomas after Elizabeth’s father.
But Thomas, when only a year old, became ill and died, an all-too-common fate for infants and children at the time. His death happened, by coincidence, during the Civil War draft riots, when horrible violence rocked Manhattan from July 13 through July 16, 1863. Much of the brutality was aimed at black bystanders. Elizabeth and Charles took a considerable risk when they insisted on escorting Thomas’s body to Brooklyn for burial.
The riots were so vicious that many black residents fled the city as soon as they could. Elizabeth Jennings, her husband, and her mother were among them. They moved to Monmouth County, New Jersey, at the seashore, to live with Elizabeth’s sister Matilda.
The Civil War Draft Riots
The greatest crisis in U.S. history, the Civil War, which pitted the South and the North against each other, raised hopes among blacks that slavery in the South might end at last.
When the first shots were fired in 1861, many Americans assumed the war would end quickly. Instead, the war would last four years and cost an estimated 750,000 lives.
President Lincoln’s signing in 1863 of the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in states that were in rebellion, was a day of great joy to those opposed to “the evil institution,” as slavery was sometimes called. In reality, it took the victory of the North’s Union army in 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment for all the slaves to be freed.
Not everyone in the North was pleased with the prospect of millions of blacks suddenly being set free. Working-class whites, assuming that many of the former slaves would head north, were worried about losing their jobs.
With the help of antiwar newspapers, politicians opposed to Lincoln had been fanning the flames of anxiety among the white working class since Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. By the time Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, many white workers were in a state of panic.
In New York City a tipping point occurred after a change in the federal draft law, which dictated the rules for required military service. The law was seen as unfair to poor and working-class people. Men who could pay three hundred dollars (a very large sum at the time) could avoid being drafted.
In the early morning of July 13, 1863, on the west side of Manhattan along Eighth and Ninth avenues, the riots began. At first the white rioters, many of whom were Irish immigrants, vented their rage on military and government buildings. Within a few hours, however, rioters began to focus their anger on any black person they encountered.
During five days of rioting, countless black men, women, and children were injured. Eleven black men were lynched. Black-owned businesses were torched. The Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and Forty-third Street was ransacked by a mob of several thousand men and women. Amazingly, all the children were evacuated before the building was burned to the ground.
White people who tried to intervene were also attacked. Rioters destroyed the property of a few whites who were known to be sympathetic to blacks, including the daughter of a well-known abolitionist and two women who were married to black men.
By the end of the rioting 119 people were verified as having been killed. It is one of the largest single incidents of civil disorder in the history of the United States. In response to the riots the federal government did back down, reducing the number of men who were selected for the draft.
In 1867 Elizabeth’s husband died. Charles Graham was just thirty-four years old. He and Elizabeth had been married for seven years. They’d had no more children after Thomas.
Elizabeth, her sister Matilda, and their mother continued to live at the New Jersey seashore, in or near Eatontown, New Jersey, for several more years. In 1871, they returned to Manhattan, where they resided at 543 Broome Street, and Elizabeth began working as a teacher at the 41st Street School.
Freedman’s Bank record filled out by a clerk but signed by Elizabeth Jennings (Graham) at the bottom.
Two years la
ter, in 1873, Elizabeth’s mother died. Elizabeth found comfort and meaning in her work. She found a new place to live, a house at 237 West Forty-first Street. She continued to teach children for the rest of her life.
On April 5, 1895, along with two other black women, she opened, in her home on West Forty-first Street, a groundbreaking school, the first free kindergarten for black children in New York City. At the same time, and also in her home, she started a small but formal lending library. She stocked it with classic works of literature and loaned the books for free to people in her neighborhood.
The same woman who had made the first major breakthrough in ending the segregated streetcar system in New York remained dedicated to progress, justice, education, and equality. When she died in 1901 at the age of seventy-four, in an upstairs room while children played downstairs, it was the end of a life well lived. Elizabeth Jennings left behind an important legacy: she provided an example of how an individual person, if strong and determined, can make the world a better place, especially if she works toward a common goal with the help of a supportive community.
The First Free Kindergarten for Colored Children in New York City
When Elizabeth Jennings (under her married name Elizabeth J. Graham) started a kindergarten in her home with two other black women, Mrs. James Herbert Morse and Mrs. Edward Curtis, she was participating in a social movement in education that was considered cutting edge.
Streetcar to Justice Page 5
