Graham, a school teacher, was running late for the Sunday service at Abyssinian Baptist Church when she boarded a white-only streetcar on July 16, 1854. The driver of the streetcar kicked her off with force at the corner of what was then Pearl Street and Chatham Street. She later published a letter in the New York Tribune about her ordeal, creating an uproar among Black New Yorkers and winning support from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to demand the end of segregation on streetcars. Graham`s father filed a lawsuit on her behalf and she was successfuly represented by attorney and future U.S. president Chester A. Arthur, winning $225 (around $7,000 today) in damages. The lawsuit helped lead to the full desegregation of streetcars and of the city`s public transit almost a decade later
Rosa Parks is hailed as the ‘first lady of civil fights’ for Montomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Elizabeth Jennings of New York, all but forgotten, beat her by over a century.Jennings was the daughter of a freeborn black man and merchant tailor who lived on Church Street downtown. She taught full-time for $225 annually at the Board of Education's Colored School No. 5 on Thomas Street and volunteered Sundays as an organist at the First Colored American Congregational Church on Sixth Street.On Sunday, July 16, 1854, late for church, she boarded a horse-drawn Third Avenue trolley car at Pearl and Chatham Streets, only to have the conductor order her off to await the next car (which, he explained, "had my people in it"). When she refused to disembark, he and the driver forcefully evicted her. "They then both seized hold of me by the arms and pulled and dragged me flat down on the bottom of the platform, so that my feet hung one way and my head the other, nearly on the ground," she recalled. "I screamed murder with all my voice." She also sued.Blacks constituted about 14,000 of New York City's 515,000 residents then. Segregation was still very much the custom, and blacks were grappling with recent immigrants for the lowest rungs of the economic and social ladder. The trolley man was denounced by Jennings's supporters as a "ruffianly Irish driver," and the Tribune questioned why respectable blacks should be "thrust from our public conveyances while German or Irish women, with a quarter of mutton or a load of codfish, can be admitted."Civil rights advocates enlisted a twenty-four-year-old lawyer named Chester A. Arthur, who had written an anti-slavery treatise as a college student and would later become president of the United States. The case was tried on February 22, 1855, in Brooklyn, where the Third Avenue Railway Company had its headquarters. Arthur reminded the judge that a new state law made common carriers liable for their agents' acts, and the judge so instructed the jury, adding, according to one account, "that colored persons, if sober, well-behaved and free from disease, had the same rights as others." The jury agreed, awarding Jennings $225 (the judge added 10 percent, plus costs), which was about half of what she had sued for, but equal to her full year's salary. The ruling apparently set a precedent. Four years later, the Eighth Avenue Railroad Company settled with a black Sunday school superintendent who had been beaten and evicted from a trolley and agreed to integrate its cars.In 1863, Jennings dodged the Draft Riots to bury her one-year-old son in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. She later opened the first kindergarten for black children in her home at 237 West Forty-First Street. Jennings would live to see a state civil rights act passed in 1873. Because of her courage, one historian later wrote, "the sounds of the river could not be stilled."TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
