Schoolteacher, Civil Rights Activist, and General Rabble Rouser: Elizabeth Jennings Graham
On December 1, 1955, in a planned act of civil disobedience, Rosa Parks, secretary for the local NAACP, refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. There was another woman, 100 years BEFORE Parks who made a similar statement.
Elizabeth Jennings Graham was a teacher in New York at the African Free School, a church organist and in her later years she ran the first ever kindergarten for black students.
In 1850, horse drawn streetcars were the newest form of transportation. Transportation for white folks only that is.
One Sunday morning, Graham was running late for her job as organist at The First Colored Congregational Church. In complete defiance to segregation law, she hopped a streetcar. The conductor ordered her off, attempted to physically remove her and finally the police were brought in. Graham still resisted and eventually was physically removed by the police.
She filed a lawsuit against the driver, the conductor and the railroad company. The law firm assigned a 24 year old green attorney, Chester A. Arthur to her case.
The case ended up receiving national attention. Her case was won, Graham received damages, and her 24 year old attorney went on to become President of the United States.
How did we not know this amazing piece of herstory? I'm glad I know it now. Keep Elizabeth Jennings Graham's legacy alive. Please share her story.
This ruling is her legacy: "Colored persons if sober, well behaved and free from disease, had the same rights as others and could neither be excluded by any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence."
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If Elizabeth Jennings was ahead of her time, she was also, on that midsummer Sunday, running late. She was due at the First Colored American Congregational Church on Sixth Street near the Bowery, where she was an organist. When she and her friend Sarah Adams reached the corner of Pearl and Chatham Streets, she didn't wait to see a placard announcing, "Negro Persons Allowed in This Car." She hailed the first horse-drawn streetcar that came along.
As soon as the two black women got on, the conductor balked. Get off, he insisted. Jennings declined. Finally he told the women they could ride, but that if any white passengers objected, "you shall go out ... or I'll put you out."
"I told him," Jennings wrote shortly after the incident, that "I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, did not know where he was born ... and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church."
The 8 or 10 white passengers must have stared. Replying that he was from Ireland, the conductor tried to haul Jennings from the car. She resisted ferociously, clinging first to a window frame, then to the conductor's own coat. "You shall sweat for this," he vowed. Driving on, withJennings's companion left at the curb, he soon spotted backup in the figure of a police officer, who boarded the car and thrust Jennings, her bonnet smashed and her dress soiled, to the sidewalk.
But, like Mrs. Parks a century later, Elizabeth Jennings had her own backup. She had grown up among a small cadre of black abolitionist ministers, journalists, educators and businessmen who stood up for their community as whites harshly reasserted the color line in the decades after New York had abolished slavery in 1827. Her father, Thomas L. Jennings, was a prominent tailor who helped found both a society that provided benefits for black people and the Abyssinian Baptist Church, which later moved to Harlem.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/nyregion/thecity/13jenn.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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Picture of Elizabeth Jennings, who helped break down barriers in New York.
More from your NY Times link:
After the incident aboard the streetcar, Jennings took her story to this extended family. Her letter detailing the incident was read in church the next day; supporters forwarded the letter to The New York Daily Tribune, whose editor was the abolitionist Horace Greeley, and to Frederick Douglass' Paper, which both reprinted it in full. Meanwhile, her father made contact with a young white lawyer named Chester Arthur.
Arthur, who would go on to become president upon the assassination of James Garfield in 1881, was at the time a beginner in his 20's only recently admitted to the bar. He nevertheless won the case, against the Third Avenue Railway Company; a judge ruled that "colored persons if sober, well behaved, and free from disease" could not be excluded from public conveyances "by any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence," according to newspaper reports. "Our readers will rejoice with us" in the "righteous verdict," remarked Frederick Douglass' Paper.
