Streetcar to Justice

by Amy Hill Hearth

  While we may take the idea of kindergarten for granted today, it was a startling idea when it was introduced in Germany in 1837 by a man named Friedrich Fröbel. He believed that playtime, if carefully supervised by teachers, was more important for young children than learning to read, write, and solve math problems. His idea was that games, songs, and activities would allow young children to mature and flourish.

  Fröbel’s idea caught on and spread to the United States. At first, kindergartens, where they existed, were private. New York and Boston took the lead on starting kindergartens that were free, allowing less fortunate children to enroll.

  By starting a free kindergarten for black children—the first one in New York City— Elizabeth Jennings and her cofounders were pioneers in the battle for equal opportunity in education, a struggle that continues to this day in many parts of the United States.

  A magazine article written by H. Cordelia Ray, one of ten black women chosen to serve on an executive committee to provide oversight of the kindergarten, provides a firsthand look. The school was financed by patrons (donors), Miss Ray wrote. While the race of the donors wasn’t mentioned in the article, the context implies that they were most likely black.

  An experienced kindergarten teacher named Leonie G. Rickard, who was probably black, was hired to be in charge of the school. The number of students is not known.

  Miss Ray’s description of the kindergarten reveals her enthusiasm. “To visit the school-room is a delightful way to spend a morning. . . . Pretty pictures of flowers, fruit and child life adorn the walls; some of the work of the children is arranged for inspection, and everything around is bright and tasteful. . . . But by far the most attractive feature is in the little children themselves . . . who are either seated at their desks, engaged in some handiwork adapted to their tiny fingers, or playing one of their many beautiful games. It is stimulating to watch their artless enjoyment and graceful movements . . . while we realize that underneath the outer manifestations are the underlying principles being so unconsciously learned.”

  Miss Ray also mentioned the outdoor activities that were central to Fröbel’s philosophy. “A yard connected with the house in which the school is situated has been carefully prepared, where the little ones have planted seeds and roots, and where they have an opportunity to exercise and play,” Miss Ray wrote. “Thus a love of the beautiful will be instilled into these youthful minds in accordance with the idea of the great founder of the kindergarten system.”

  In addition to the kindergarten, two other programs sponsored by the same group were being held in the house, Miss Ray wrote. One was a sewing school on Saturday mornings for older pupils. The other was a small lending library. It was named by donors after the person who was serving as the librarian: Elizabeth Jennings Graham.

  The house belonging to Chester A. Arthur in Ossining, New York.

  THIRTEEN

  How a Creepy Old House Led to the Writing of This Book

  I LEARNED OF ELIZABETH JENNINGS because I was curious about an old, abandoned house.

  From 1987 to 1996 my husband and I lived in Ossining, New York, a village on the Hudson River about an hour north of Manhattan. In our neighborhood there was a certain house, covered with vines and partially boarded up, that fascinated me. I could imagine that it had been very pretty at one time. Located across the street from a cemetery, the house was perched high on a hill and must have had beautiful views of the Hudson River.

  A journalist is trained to keep her eyes open to possibilities. Who lived there? I wondered. Why does no one live there now? Why is it in such terrible shape? What will happen to it?

  The neighborhood rumor (confirmed by a newspaper account and the local historical society) was that the house had once been the summer home of a New York lawyer named Chester A. Arthur. Yes, that Chester A. Arthur, the twenty-first president of the United States.

  Now that got my attention.

  I went to the library. The first thing I did was look up Chester A. Arthur, about whom I knew little. As I read about him, I was fascinated to learn that in his youth he had been a lawyer with a special interest in equal rights cases for blacks. There was a mention of a famous case he had won called Elizabeth Jennings v. Third Avenue Railroad Company. I had never heard of it.

  I began to dig deeper. None of the old references spelled out the details of the case or, more important, answered the questions most urgently on my mind: who was Elizabeth Jennings, and what had happened?

  Time and again, whenever the opportunity arose, I dug a little deeper. Researching Elizabeth Jennings became something of a hobby.

  One Valentine’s Day my husband asked me what I would like to do that day. What he meant was did I want to go out to dinner or maybe see a movie together. I told him that what I really wanted was to spend the day in New York City, preferably at the main branch of the New York Public Library, researching Elizabeth Jennings v. Third Avenue Railroad Company, and that he could go with me and it would be fun. And that’s what we did.

  These are the best kinds of mysteries. I found buried in the footnotes of old history books and on the pages of long-ago newspapers the hints of a story that sounded strangely similar to that of Rosa Parks, only it had taken place more than a hundred years earlier in New York City.

  I turned to long-defunct newspapers and the writings of Frederick Douglass, all at the time on microfilm or microfiche, and learned that not only was Elizabeth Jennings a forgotten hero of equal rights for blacks but late in life she had been a founder of the first free black kindergarten in New York.

  In the years since I began my research, her story, thanks to the internet, has begun to surface here and there. Much of the information about her, however, is brief, lacks context, and contains mistakes. This is one of the downsides of the internet: people copy and paste information without checking to see if it is correct. A lot of what is on the internet is wrong or misleading. Go to research libraries, small historical societies, and cemeteries, and find out the truth for yourself!

  Meanwhile, Elizabeth Jennings’s name also began to appear in academic books, a few museum exhibits, and at least one walking tour of New York. To the general public, however, Elizabeth Jennings is still mostly unknown.

  Street sign, Elizabeth Jennings Place, added in 2007 in Manhattan near the actual site of the incident.

  FOURTEEN

  Retracing Her Footsteps

  THE INTERSECTION WAS QUIET, almost peaceful, by the standards of Manhattan.

  Weirdly deserted, I thought.

  This was the first time I had visited. It was September 2003, and the spot where Elizabeth Jennings had boarded the streetcar and been removed from it was not the busy intersection it had been in 1854. It was simply a place where two narrow and crooked streets converged.

  Although the spot was surrounded by enormous buildings, there were no people in sight and no activity except for a discarded fast-food wrapper caught by an occasional breeze.

  As I studied the area, maps and notebooks in hand, I realized that I was being watched by a police officer. The neighborhood is dominated by court and police buildings, including the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the New York State Supreme Court, and the headquarters of the New York City police department. It was just two years since the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a short distance away, had been destroyed by terrorists, resulting in the deaths of nearly three thousand people. New York City was still on edge. As I juggled an armful of maps, both old and new, I found the towers’ absence disorienting. I kept looking up, expecting them to be there.

  I heard drumming, and, walking toward it, came across a civil rights march taking place at City Hall Park. A woman carried a placard that declared, IMMIGRANT WOMEN’S FREEDOM MARCH while another proclaimed, WE DEMAND CIVIL RIGHTS FOR ALL. Following them was a group carrying a sign, THE ARAB-AMERICAN FAMILY SUPPORT CENTER. And bringing up the rear was a group representing the hotel worke
rs’ union in New York.

  Returning to the exact spot where Elizabeth Jennings boarded the streetcar and was assaulted, I could not find a single clue that a milestone event in the pursuit of equal rights for blacks had taken place here in this section of lower Manhattan once known as Five Points. There was no sign, plaque, or statue.

  But even if you knew that something important had happened at the intersection of Pearl and Chatham streets, you’d have trouble locating the spot. That’s because there is no Chatham Street anymore. It was renamed Park Row long ago. And it’s not the only street in the area that has been renamed, rerouted, or changed in some way.

  The only historical marker anywhere near the site in 2003 was a small green street sign that proclaimed, JOSEPH DOHERTY CORNER. A young policeman standing beneath it, who told me that he was there “every day,” couldn’t say who Joseph Doherty is or was.

  (I learned later that Doherty was a former volunteer in the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He escaped during a 1981 trial for murder and made his way to the United States, where he was caught and arrested in 1983. He attracted sympathizers, including celebrities and politicians. Most of the time he was in the United States he was housed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. The street corner near his cell was renamed in an effort to call attention to his situation. After a nine-year legal battle, he was deported.)

  Nearby, at Duane Street, a small alleyway had been named Cardinal Hayes Place. In Chinatown, which begins a block away to the east, Kimlau Square hosts memorials to Lin Ze Xu, a hero in China in the 1800s in part for trying to stop the opium trade, and to Benjamin Ralph Kimlau, a Chinese American who fought heroically for the United States in World War II. Kimlau Square, it turned out, was formerly known as Chatham Square.

  Nothing, anywhere, about Elizabeth Jennings.

  The old streetcar tracks are still there, at least partially. While most are embedded underneath layers of asphalt, some can still be seen at Kimlau Square.

  A subway stop nearby strikes me in a way as a tribute to Elizabeth Jennings. Every day millions of people of many cultures, countries, and ethnicities ride shoulder-to-shoulder and think nothing of it.

  Thirteen years later, in 2016, I revisited the area to see how it might have evolved. The newly built Freedom Tower, which replaced the World Trade Center, now loomed over the southern end of Manhattan. The African Burial Ground, a short walk from the site, had become a National Monument overseen by the National Park Service.

  The intersection had changed little, but something caught my attention nearby. A small green street sign proclaiming ELIZABETH JENNINGS PLACE had been added at the corner of Park Row and Spruce Street, which is near (but not at) the intersection where the assault occurred long ago.

  Looking into this promising development, I learned that students at Public School 361, the Children’s Workshop School, had worked hard to get the sign installed. With the help and guidance of the third-and fourth-grade teacher Miriam Sicherman, the students gathered signatures and petitioned the city of New York to put up the sign. They were the second group of schoolchildren to try.

  In a phone interview Ms. Sicherman explained that her school undertakes a social justice project each year to coincide with the national holiday honoring the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ms. Sicherman had read a newspaper story about Elizabeth Jennings and suggested to the children that they could try to find out more about the long-forgotten schoolteacher turned activist.

  “There wasn’t much out there about her, but there was enough to write a play,” Ms. Sicherman said. With the backing of the school’s principal, Maria Velez-Clarke, Ms. Sicherman and her students set out to see if it was possible to have a playground on Pearl Street renamed in Elizabeth Jennings’s honor.

  They were turned down. Instead, city officials said they could have an honorary street name added for Elizabeth Jennings, although not at the intersection where Elizabeth Jennings boarded the streetcar and was assaulted. That intersection had already been renamed for someone else, Joseph Doherty.

  City officials chose a nearby intersection. Ms. Sicherman and her students accepted the offer, and the sign was added in a ceremony in the spring of 2007.

  Perhaps one day a plaque will explain what happened to Elizabeth Jennings. Maybe a playground will be renamed, as the students of the Children’s Workshop School wished. I envision a statue in City Hall Park. There are only a handful of statues of women in New York City, and I think it’s about time city leaders added another.

  With its history of rebuilding and its haste to greet the future, perhaps it’s not surprising that New York City sometimes forgets its past. But part of that is the fault of the people, not just New Yorkers, but all of us. Too often we think of history as a permanent series of events. The reality is that stories from the past are often forgotten. Much depends on who remembers and tells the stories from the past and how and why they are told. The contributions of black Americans, other minorities, and women have been overlooked, often deliberately. Too quickly we may conclude that if an event is not already in an official textbook, it didn’t happen or it’s not important. The story of Elizabeth Jennings reminds us that this is not so. Sometimes, interesting stories are right in front of us, if only we take time to look.

  Chester A. Arthur being sworn in as president of the United States at his home in Manhattan.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Chester A. Arthur: Tragedy Leads to Presidency

  THIS BOOK IS ELIZABETH JENNINGS’S STORY, but many readers may be curious about Chester A. Arthur and what happened to him after the court case.

  Except for a three-month adventure to Kansas with a friend, Chester Arthur continued to live in Manhattan and work at the law firm. During the Civil War he was deeply involved with the Union cause, eventually rising to the rank of general in the Union army.

  When the war was over, he became active in what was known as machine politics, the Democratic Party organization, often referred to as Tammany Hall, which played a major role in controlling New York City and New York State politics. Over time Chester Arthur became more powerful and connected. In 1880 James A. Garfield, who was running for president of the United States, chose him as his vice-presidential running mate, and they won the election.

  Tragically, President Garfield, after less than four months in office, was shot by a man named Charles J. Guiteau at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington, D.C. Garfield died eleven weeks later in Elberon, New Jersey, at the seashore where he had been taken in the hope that he might recover.

  This meant that Chester Arthur became president, but it was a job he really didn’t want. His wife had died the year before. He was said to never have recovered from her death. His grief, and his own failing health, affected his time in the White House.

  He had other reasons to grieve as well. Like Elizabeth Jennings and her husband, Charles Graham, Chester Arthur and his wife, Ellen, lost an infant son in 1863.

  While lacking the leadership skills to become an outstanding president, he had a major success by signing a series of treaties known as the Geneva Convention. The treaties dictate the humane treatment during wartime of civilians, prisoners of war (POWs), and wounded soldiers, and are still largely in effect today.

  He also established what is called civil service in the federal government by signing the Pendleton Act. This meant that federal jobs were to be awarded on the basis of merit, not political connections.

  When Chester Arthur became president, and again after he died in 1886, the Elizabeth Jennings story was briefly reintroduced to the public. The New York Times, for example, highlighted the Jennings case as one of Chester Arthur’s triumphs as a young lawyer many years before.

  Both Chester Arthur and Elizabeth Jennings died from complications of what was then called Bright’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the kidneys. It seems likely that after that day in court in 1855, they never crossed paths again.

  Near the end of
President Arthur’s life, on a railroad trip he took across the country, many of those waiting to greet him were black men and women. An especially supportive group honored him at the Lafayette, Indiana, train station on July 31, 1883, presenting him with a plaque thanking him for his dedication to “justice to an oppressed people.” In black communities across the United States people had not forgotten that in his days as a young lawyer Chester Arthur had accepted and won an important case called Elizabeth Jennings v. Third Avenue Railroad Company.

  A portrait of Chester A. Arthur.

  Bibliography

  I BEGAN RESEARCHING THE STORY of Elizabeth Jennings about twenty years ago and have consulted many libraries, archives, and historical associations. In several cases—the New York Public Library, for example—I visited multiple times to follow up one lead or another. While I was working on other book projects, sometimes the Elizabeth Jennings story had to wait, but I always returned to it when I had the chance.

  Doing research takes persistence, and sometimes it can be disappointing. I have a file folder called “Dead Ends” to prove it! Below, I’ve listed the places where I had success with researching either online, in person, or both. If you can’t visit these institutions, you can explore their websites, where you are bound to find topics that intrigue you. Who knows? You may start researching a mystery of your own.

  The New York Public Library

  www.nypl.org

  This is one of my favorite places in the world. The librarians helped me locate obscure newspapers, kept deep in the vaults. I could not have written this book without the New York Public Library or its affiliate, the Schomburg, listed below.

  The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture/NYPL

  www.nypl.org/locations/schomburg