Streetcar to Justice

by Amy Hill Hearth

  When she arrived at home, Elizabeth’s parents were shocked at the sight of her. They sent for a doctor immediately. The doctor, whose name we do not know, arrived quickly. He examined her and concluded that she had suffered many bruises, cuts, and scratches and probably broken bones from being twice removed by force from the streetcar, first, when she was dragged off the car by the conductor and driver and a second time, when she was pushed by the policeman. He told her that she must have complete bed rest. Elizabeth’s father instructed her to write down, in her own words, an account of what had happened, with as much detail as possible. Propped up in bed, Elizabeth wrote a letter describing her version of events.

  Then her father left the house in a hurry. With Elizabeth’s written statement in his hand, he disappeared into the city.

  SIX

  An Admired Family

  WITHIN HOURS OF THE ASSAULT Elizabeth’s father had traveled throughout lower Manhattan and shown her letter to the black leaders of New York.

  Thomas Jennings had protested racial injustice many times in his life. As a young man he had marched with others through the streets of lower Manhattan, and he had joined and supported numerous organizations that advocated for the members of his race.

  But this time the incident was deeply personal. His own daughter had been not only insulted but attacked and injured. He would help her in any way he could.

  As an activist himself he knew where to turn for help. He reached out to his friends, an influential group that included the most famous black leader in America at the time, Frederick Douglass.

  The organizations to which Thomas Jennings belonged make an impressive list. He had been present at the first, second, and third National Conventions of Free People of Color (sometimes also called the National Conventions of Colored Men), held in Philadelphia in 1830, 1831, and 1832. He was a founder of the Wilberforce Philanthropic Society, a black self-help organization named after the British abolitionist (antislavery advocate) William Wilberforce. He was a founder, also, of the Abyssinian Baptist Church and an organization called the Phoenix Society, launched in 1833 “to promote the improvement of the colored people in morals, literature, and the mechanic arts.”

  By profession Thomas Jennings was a tailor and self-made businessman. He got his break as a young man when he was apprenticed to a successful tailor, whose name has been lost to time. Eventually Thomas owned his own shop, located at Nassau and Chatham streets.

  Thomas Jennings was also an inventor. In 1821 or so, he was awarded a patent from the U.S. government for developing a new method to dry-clean clothing. He was perhaps the first black person to receive a patent.

  Although he was treated as a second-class citizen because of the color of his skin, Thomas Jennings was a patriotic man who loved his country, according to Frederick Douglass, who wrote a tribute to Jennings after his death. During the War of 1812 Jennings had volunteered to dig trenches on Long Island that would help the American forces fighting the British, and his most-prized possession was the patent he was awarded by the U.S. government and signed by John Quincy Adams, the secretary of state and future president.

  As a young man Thomas Jennings married a woman named Elizabeth Cartwright, whose father, Jacob, had been a black soldier in the Revolutionary War.

  The couple had at least five children—William, Thomas Jr., Matilda, Lucy, and Elizabeth (named after her mother).

  Frederick Douglass in a photograph taken in 1880. He wrote admiringly of Elizabeth Jennings, saying that her conduct was “courageous” and “beyond all praise.”

  At right, the original 1837 newspaper clipping of the speech “On the Improvement of the Mind,” recited by ten-year-old Elizabeth Jennings.

  Also living in the family home were boarders who rented rooms, a common practice at the time. Among those who stayed with the family were black teachers, seamstresses, and at least one doctor.

  Elizabeth and her siblings attended one of the African Free Schools founded by the New York Manumission Society, an antislavery group. The Jennings children were fortunate compared with most American children, black and white. At that time many children did not go to school.

  The Jennings children also were expected to participate in civic groups that aimed to improve conditions for blacks. In the fall of 1837, at the age of ten, Elizabeth, for example, recited an essay to an audience of adults at a meeting of the Ladies’ Literary Society of the City of New York. This was an organization of black women who promoted literacy and self-improvement as the way to advancement.

  Speaking to a roomful of adults may sound like a formidable task for many ten-year-olds, but recitation (repeating something aloud from memory) was a learning technique then commonly used by educators. Recitations by children were even a form of popular entertainment, which the author Charles Dickens poked fun of with his character the Infant Phenomenon in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.

  The essay recited by Elizabeth, titled “On the Improvement of the Mind,” contends that the path to a successful life is through education, learning, and “the constant aiming of perfection.”

  While almost certainly written by an adult, possibly her mother, who may have belonged to the organization, Elizabeth proudly delivered the address, which was published afterward in The Colored American newspaper. The audience was inspired. These were bold words at a time when the very idea would have been radical for a black child, especially one who was female. Recited by a young black girl, the words had an impact on listeners.

  Elizabeth Jennings, at the age of ten, was already learning to try hard, to aim high, and, with courage and confidence, to fight the racial prejudice that so unfairly held black people back.

  Frederick Douglass and the Black Press

  Frederick Douglass was an extraordinary American and the most famous black person of his time. Born into slavery in Maryland in 1817, he escaped to Massachusetts as a young man. While in his early twenties he was asked to give an impromptu speech at a meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He made such a strong impression that he was recruited immediately to deliver lectures arguing against slavery.

  Douglass was not only a brilliant public speaker but an outstanding writer and journalist. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published in 1845, was read widely. Two years later he started his own abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, in Rochester, New York. He renamed the publication Frederick Douglass’ Paper, which he published from 1851 to 1860. In January 1859 he started Douglass’ Monthly.

  He was among several black men who launched groundbreaking newspapers. John B. Russwurm, Rev. Samuel Cornish, William Hamilton, and Rev. Peter Williams, Jr., started Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper in the U.S. Published in New York from 1827 to 1829, the paper was edited by Russwurm and Cornish.

  From 1837 to 1841 a black newspaper titled The Colored American (called, for a short time, The Weekly Advocate) was published by Cornish. Others published in New York State in the 1840s or 1850s included The Elevator, National Watchman, People’s Press, Ram’s Horn, The Colored Man’s Journal, and The Anglo-African.

  The front page of an issue of Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist newspaper, The North Star.

  A letter from a San Francisco group in support of Elizabeth Jennings, published in Frederick Douglass’ Paper.

  But Douglass’s publications were the most well known of them all. Through his writings, along with his lectures, he made an enormous contribution to the fight against slavery. His goal was not only freedom for the enslaved but social and economic equality for all blacks. His chronicles included writings about people who were taking action in an admirable way. Among them was the young New York City schoolteacher named Elizabeth Jennings, whose conduct he called “courageous” and “beyond all praise.”

  Who Should Go to School?

  There was a time when children in the United States did not have to go to school. Public education for all was a social movement that gath
ered momentum in the second half of the 1800s. Before that time going to school was a privilege for children whose parents could pay for it. Going to school, for the lucky few whose parents could afford it, meant attending a private academy, such as the African Free School, where Elizabeth Jennings and her siblings were enrolled.

  The children of most free blacks as well as poor and working-class whites had to work to support their families. In rural communities these children labored on the family farm, from harvesting crops and milking cows to hauling water, cooking, washing clothes, and other chores to keep the household running. In cities children of peddlers carried goods for sale on their backs. Children also worked in factories to help their parents make ends meet. Some of these jobs were very dangerous, and laws that would make it illegal to hire children did not yet exist.

  Some families who could afford to send their children to school chose to send their sons but not their daughters. When girls were allowed to attend school, it was often believed that their education, with an emphasis on a liberal arts curriculum, should prepare them to be better mothers and wives, and most important, to nurture better-educated sons.

  New York African Free School, right, in a drawing by a student named John Burns. Courtesy of New-York Historical Society.

  A classroom in a school for black children in New York in 1861. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.

  Some educators strongly believed that girls had no place in the classroom at all. Others restricted them for reasons that seem frivolous today. Girls were seen as delicate and in need of protection. Classrooms for young women were sometimes even held on the lower floors of buildings because climbing flights of stairs was thought to be a danger to a girl’s health.

  The original New-York Daily Tribune story that includes Elizabeth Jennings’s firsthand account of what happened to her on the fateful afternoon of July 16, 1854.

  SEVEN

  A “Shameful” and “Loathsome” Issue

  WORD SPREAD QUICKLY about the assault on Elizabeth Jennings, and an emergency meeting was called at the First Colored American Congregational Church.

  Under doctor’s orders to stay in bed, Elizabeth was unable to attend the meeting, which was held on either July 17 or 18. “I would have come up myself, but am quite sore and stiff from the treatment I received from those monsters in human form yesterday afternoon,” she wrote. Her firsthand description of the assault was read aloud.

  Thomas Jennings attended the meeting and added a few observations. What an emotional scene it must have been, with Elizabeth’s much-admired father standing in the front of the gathered congregation, speaking about his beloved daughter.

  The meeting resulted in a decision: The incident was not going to be shunted aside or forgotten. Five people, including Thomas Jennings, were appointed to a committee that would study the facts and pursue justice.

  The committee’s first step was to let others know about the assault. Elizabeth’s firsthand, written account was delivered to the offices of the New-York Daily Tribune, which published it under the headline OUTRAGE UPON COLORED PERSONS on July 19, 1854.

  Adding to the frustration of Elizabeth’s supporters was the fact that segregation on the modes of transportation in the Northeast, not just New York City, was a long-standing problem. There were many reports of black travelers, both men and women, who were treated badly and unfairly on northern omnibuses, streetcars, railroads, ships, and steamboats.

  Northern abolitionists, who were trying to find ways to end slavery in the South, were embarrassed by these incidents. They are “shameful in the extreme,” a white attorney named David L. Child, who belonged to an antislavery organization in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote in a newspaper called The Liberator. He was referring to the way blacks were treated by stagecoach companies and on steamboats throughout the North, not just in Boston or New York. His words were published in 1831, twenty-three years before Elizabeth Jennings was assaulted and ejected from the streetcar in New York City.

  An article in an 1831 edition of The Liberator on the topic of segregation on modes of transportation in the North.

  A lengthy commentary in the September 7, 1850, edition of the New-York Daily Tribune by an irate editorial writer who had witnessed an incident on a Manhattan horse-drawn streetcar.

  Frederick Douglass wrote frequently of routine discrimination against black travelers. On steamboats that traversed the Hudson River, for example, he called the way in which colored persons were uniformly treated “brutal.” They are, he noted, “compelled sometimes to stroll the decks nearly all night, before they can get a place to lie down, and that place frequently unfit for a dog’s accommodation.”

  IN THE FALL OF 1850 the New-York Daily Tribune published the story of an incident observed by an editorial or “opinion” writer, probably a white man. His name is not known. As was the custom with editorials, no byline was given.

  The editorial writer had witnessed a conductor refusing to allow a black woman to ride on an uptown streetcar. “Stepping to the door to learn the reason . . . as there were but two or three persons in the car, we saw that the woman was copper-colored, either half or quarter African by descent, and were informed that this was the reason [she was removed],” he wrote.

  He questioned the conductor, whom he quoted as saying, “Can’t help it, sir; the passengers make a fuss. . . .”

  In a lengthy commentary the nameless writer voiced his belief that the treatment of the black woman was not the fault of the conductor or the streetcar company, but the “shameful” and “loathsome” general attitude in society toward black people. This attitude, he maintained, was left over from the days when slavery had been legal.

  A letter to the editor in response to the commentary in the New-York Daily Tribune, September 16, 1850.

  New York, the writer claimed, had fallen behind New England in addressing the issue of segregated transportation. “Africans are carried now the same as Whites throughout the greater part of New-England, though twenty years ago” it was “as brutal there as it now is here.”

  He accused white New Yorkers of being hypocrites. “Let us purify our own borders before arraying ourselves in a grand crusade against the sins of our neighbors” in the South, he wrote.

  Several days later a man who identified himself only by the initials P.A.B. wrote a letter in response. Because of the context of his letter, it’s clear that he was black. Wanting to share his observations, he noted that from his experiences it was not the passengers but the conductors who were responsible.

  “In nine cases out of ten the passengers have no objection,” he wrote. “I can ride [without anyone objecting] in the Brooklyn omnibuses or in the cars of any Railroad except the City [Manhattan] cars. In the North River*, New-Haven, Harlem, Long Island, and all the Jersey lines I am a frequent passenger and I always take first class cars, and I have never yet been refused a passage, but on our City cars and omnibuses I am either rejected or pointed to an outside seat, which I of course refuse, preferring to walk. . . .”

  Specifically, the letter writer stressed, the problem seemed to stem from individual conductors. He mentioned a conversation he’d had with the owner of an omnibus company who told him that he’d never given orders to refuse “respectable colored persons seats” but that his drivers often did so anyway, claiming, whether or not it was true, that “the passengers made a fuss.”

  It’s clear that the issue of mistreatment of black riders on public transportation was not new in 1854 and had been much discussed and debated. What had happened to Elizabeth Jennings was another in a long line of incidents in which conductors insulted, pushed, and ejected black passengers.

  Trying to Make a Difference

  Some white people in the North, upset by the treatment of black travelers, found small ways to show their support and fight for change.

  The attorney David L. Child of Boston, Massachusetts, wrote, for example, about one small effort to pressure steamboat captains to treat black passe
ngers fairly. Child, one of a group of eight white men who were delegates of the American Anti-Slavery Society, praised a white steamboat captain named Lewis Davis for his equitable treatment of black passengers. Child and his group had recently traveled together from Philadelphia to New York City partly on Captain Davis’s boat.

  By calling attention in the press to Captain Davis, whose steamboat, Philadelphia, carried passengers between Philadelphia and Bristol, Pennsylvania, Child hoped to inspire other captains to act in a more equitable manner toward black passengers.

  Child noted that the delegates of the American Anti-Slavery Society were willing to boycott other more convenient ways of travel in order to support Captain Davis.

  “All of the . . . gentlemen were desirous . . . to go by the Rail Road Line, via Bordentown and Amboy,” wrote Child, “but they chose to take a circuitous,” or roundabout, “route, and a slower way of getting to their destination. They did this to show their appreciation of the captain of a boat who treated white and black travelers as equals.” Child added that Captain Davis’s competitors had lost business worth about twenty-seven dollars, which was what the men’s tickets cost.

  Hoping that others would take note, Child publicized his account. His letter was published in the May 7, 1831, edition of The Liberator, where perhaps it inspired others to do the same.

  William Lloyd Garrison and The Liberator