SYMHC Classics: Elizabeth Jennings Graham

The subject of this 2018 episode is sometimes called a 19th-century Rosa Parks. When Elizabeth boarded a Manhattan streetcar in 1854, a chain of events began which became an important to the civil rights of New York's Black citizens.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. At the end of our recent episode on
Viola Desmond, we talked about frequent comparisons between her and
Rosa Parks and how those comparisons have some limitations, and
we mentioned Elizabeth Jennings Graham, who is sometimes called the
nineteenth century Rosa Parks. That's a comparison that has some
similar limitations. We said we would bring our episode on

(00:25):
Graham out as a Saturday classic, and here it is.
This episode originally came out on June and Enjoy. Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm

(00:48):
Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, And today's topic
is a person who is sometimes called the nineteenth century
Rosa Parks. The comparison is somewhat apt because you'll see
as her story folds. But while Elizabeth Jennings Graham was
raised by parents who were active in advocating for better
quality of life and for people of color, her involvement

(01:11):
and how this thing played out one was a little
bit accidental. Uh So it wasn't something that was part
of a bigger civil rights movement necessarily. Uh, it just
kind of happened. The other thing that's interesting and that
makes them very different is that while the story of
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus Boycott and the part
she played in it became very much a part of

(01:34):
history that remains talked about for a long time, Elizabeth
Jennings Graham kind of fell off the radar and people
lost the thread of her part of history and her
uh work for improvement of the quality of life of
black people in nineteenth century New York. Yeah, it's way
earlier than the Montgomery bus boycott and also not in

(01:55):
the South. Yeah, it is a hundred years earlier. It's
like a um, So the Montgomery bus boycott happened in
this inn initial incident that catalyzed this whole thing started
in eighteen fifty four. Parts of it continued into eighteen
fifty five, so almost exactly a hundred years fascinating story,

(02:18):
and again it kind of got lost for a while,
but some historians have really picked up the the flag
and kind of done some research and really investigated who
this person was. And there's also a fun little tag
at the end of this about how kids are starting
to learn more and more about her story. So the
date of Elizabeth Jennings Graham's birth is completely unknown. We

(02:38):
don't have any idea what the month or the date
of her birth was. Her death certificate at lists eighteen
twenty six is the year of her birth, but a
census that was conducted in eighteen fifty lists it as
eighteen thirty. We'll talk a little bit later about something
that gives a clue about which of those might be

(02:58):
more correct, but we still don't know what would have
caused that discrepancy in the first place. And Elizabeth's father,
Thomas Jennings, was the first black man to hold a U. S. Patent,
which he was awarded in the early eighteen twenties. He
had begun his professional life in tailoring, and he had
invented a means to clean clothes using solvents. It was
an early version of dry cleaning. I have read in

(03:20):
some places it was called dry scouring, but we don't
actually have the text of the patent. He and Elizabeth's mother,
who was also named Elizabeth, were part of New York's
black middle class. They lived at one sixty seven Church
Street in Lower Manhattan, and they were active in the community,
working on improving the lives of other black citizens. Slavery
had been abolished in New York during Thomas's lifetime, over

(03:43):
the course of a series of laws between seventeen eight seven.
These phased out the institution of slavery in New York incrementally,
and he had used his patent money to purchase the
freedom of some of his family members. Yeah, he had
been born free, but not everyone in his family had been,
and Thomas had long been involved in activism against racial injustice.

(04:05):
He attended the first three National Conventions of Free People
of Color, which began in eighteen thirty, and he helped
found the Wilberforce Philanthropic Society, which helped black citizens improve
their lives. Thomas and his wife Elizabeth had at least
four other children. In addition to their daughter Elizabeth, there
were two boys and two girls we know about named

(04:25):
William Thomas Junior, Matilda, and Lucy. The children all attended school.
This is the time when education wasn't a given for
children of any background. Public schools were established in New
York in the early eighteen hundreds, but there weren't any
kind of requirements to attend school, and a lot of
children were working at jobs at a very early age.

(04:46):
The Jennings children were a lot more educated than many
other children in New York, and from a young age,
Elizabeth followed in her family's ideology of fighting against racial injustice.
At the age of ten, she recited an essay at
a gather ring of the Ladies Literary Society of the
City of New York entitled on the Improvement of the Mind,

(05:06):
which was later published in the paper The Colored American.
That paper was published in eighteen thirty seven, So if
she was ten at the time, this supports that eighteen
twenty six year of birth a little bit more than
we have anything to support the eighteen thirty year. Although
Elizabeth Jennings was born a free woman, she was also
still a black woman, and she grew up in a

(05:26):
largely de facto segregated New York. Slavery was not abolished
at the at the federal level at the time of
the primary event that we're talking about today. The Fugitive
Slave Act of eighteen fifty was still in effect. That
act required that enslaved people who ran away to non
slave states be captured and returned to their owners. Aiding

(05:48):
someone who escaped enslavement was also illegal. Free black men
and women in states that had abolished slavery feared that
they could be kidnapped and transported to a slave state
even though they had not been enslaved. Yeah, that was
a very real concern because how they would have no
way to fight that if someone dragged them into a

(06:11):
slave state and sold them, they have no recourse against
it at that point. It was really dangerous time. Yeah,
we've we've talked about it in episodes before and talked
about people even the taking the step of if they
had the means, moving to Canada to get away from
the risk of being sold into slavery. In the United States,
there also were not a lot of job prospects for

(06:31):
a young person of color to aspire to, even in
New York. Ministry and teaching jobs were some of the
few non labor positions that were available to black citizens,
and those positions were finite. They could only minister or
teach other people of color. But the Jennings children really
seemed to do quite well for themselves. William ended up

(06:51):
becoming a businessman. I believe he moved to Boston. Thomas Jr.
Was a dentist. Uh, he moved to New Orleans. I
think and Matilda was addressed Acre. Elizabeth became a teacher
I Read One Thing where in eighteen fifty five she
was one of only thirteen black teachers in New York
uh and after a year of teaching at Colored Public

(07:11):
School Number two, she worked in the system that was
established by the New York Society for the Promotion of
Education among Colored Children, which was a better school system
for her, and she also worked as a church organist.
On July eighteen fifty four, Jennings was traveling to the
first Colored American Congregational Church preparing to a company the

(07:32):
afternoon choir practice. As usual, she walked a short distance
from the Jennings home to a street car stop at
the corner of Pearl and Shay them She ran into
her friends Sarah E. Adams as she walked, and the
two of them walked together to the stop. She tried
to board a horse drawn street car which was run
by the Third Avenue Railway Company. Horse Drawn street cars

(07:54):
normally had two men who were running them. There was
the driver and the conductor, and the car company had
a policy against allowing black passengers. This was a common
policy on street cars. Often black people who wanted to
take a street car would have to wait for one
with a sign that indicated that people of color were
allowed to board, but those were not as frequent as

(08:15):
cars that only accepted white passengers. The problem of the
transportation system and its treatment of black people was not new,
and a rapidly growing city like New York, street cars
were increasingly relied upon by the city's inhabitants, and activists
have been writing about the poor treatment of black travelers
for more than two decades before this point. And we're

(08:37):
gonna pause a little bit early for our sponsor break here,
because I want to keep the account of what actually
happened once the street car came all together. So we're
gonna jump right back in after we first have this pause.

(08:58):
Elizabeth was a little bit worried about making it to
the church to accompany the choir on time, so she
took a chance. Sometimes a conductor would allow a black
passenger to board if none of the other passengers objected,
And so when Elizabeth explained her predicament to the conductor,
he was not sympathetic. He told her she could just
wait for the next car, and she wrote about this

(09:21):
incident quote he told me that the other car had
my people in it, that it was appropriated for that purpose.
I then told him I had no people. It was
no particular occasion. I wished to go to church, as
I had been doing for the last six months, and
I did not wish to be detained. So even though
the conductor had told her to get off the street car,
Elizabeth stayed on. She said she would take the next

(09:42):
one if it was one that would take black passengers,
but she was going to stay on the current one
until I got there. When the second street car came,
it was full, which was another problem that arose from
the scarcity of cars that allowed black passengers, and this
set up a battle of wills. Both Elizabe and the
conductor of the car she was standing on. We're willing

(10:03):
to stand their ground and wait for the other one
to give in. Eventually, though it was the driver's desire
to get going that led the conductor to yield. Elizabeth
was no shrinking violet, and even as she was allowed
to board, she told the conductor that she didn't know
where he was born, but that she was a New
Yorker and that she had never been treated so poorly.

(10:23):
While attempting to go to church and that he was
an impudent fellow. The conductor answered that he was from Ireland,
when she replied that she didn't care where he was from.
She only cared that quote. He behaved himself and did
not insult genteel persons. That set the conductor off. He
physically removed Elizabeth's friend Sarah, and then dragged Elizabeth herself out.

(10:47):
She attempted to resist by holding onto the window sash,
and after a bit of a struggle, the conductor told
the driver to come out and help him. The two
men took Jennings by the arms and removed her from
the car, dragging her down to the platform. She was
screaming and her friend was shouting, you'll killer, don't kill her.

(11:08):
And after she had been dumped onto the platform, the
driver went back to his horses and in an incredibly
bold move, before the street car could leave, Elizabeth got
up and she marched right back onto the street car
and she sat in a seat. The conductor was irate
and he ordered the driver to take off and to
drive as quickly as he could until they found either

(11:29):
a police officer or a police station. When the driver
spotted a policeman, he stopped the car and the conductor
spoke with the officer, and after the conductor told his
side of the story, Jennings, who was not asked to
give her version of the story, was removed. The conductor
wrote his name and the street car number on a
slip of paper and hand it to her and the
street car left. Yeah, incidentally, he wrote the wrong number

(11:53):
for the street car on that slip of paper. It's
unknown whether he was trying to hide something or if
he just was incorrect, but just one of the many,
uh many problems of that day. So Elizabeth at this point,
I mean, she had literally been thrown on the ground.
She was kind of a mess. She was normally a
very put together, uh really you know, lovely young woman.

(12:14):
And so she headed home on foot. A bookseller from
Germany had actually approached her, and he said that he
had seen the entire incident, that he would be happy
to serve as a witness, and he gave her his information.
When she got home, her disheveled appearance really frightened her parents.
They had a doctor come and examined her. He put
her on bed rest and mentioned that she might have

(12:35):
broken bones. Yeah, she had a bit of a limp
by the time she got home, and Elizabeth wrote out
everything that had happened at her father's urging. So while
she rested at home, her father took that letter that
she had written to leaders of the black community throughout
Lower Manhattan, and that included Frederick Douglas. A meeting was

(12:55):
called at the First Colored American Congregational Church Quote for
the purpose of making an expression of public sentiment condemnatory
of the outrage committed upon the person of Miss Elizabeth Jennings,
a highly respectable female. Elizabeth couldn't attend due to her
doctor impost bed rest, so her father went in her
place and read allowed her account of events on the

(13:19):
events on the street car. A five person committee was
formed to examine the facts the incident and to decide
on what the next step should be. They took a
collection to help cover the costs of an attorney. Elizabeth's
account was also sent to the paper, and on July
nineteenth of eighteen fifty four, that story was printed in
the New York Daily Tribune. So while the Tribune was

(13:41):
a New York paper, it had weekly editions that were
mailed to subscribers throughout the country. Thomas Jennings was on
this five man investigative committee. He and his colleagues decided
to fight the street car company for their treatment of
his daughter. They hired attorney chester A. Arthur, although he
wasn't their first choice. Their first choice had been abolitionist

(14:02):
Erastus D. Culver, but when they met with him, he
referred them to Arthur, who had only been practicing law
for six weeks. Because Culver had been elected to a
judge ship in Brooklyn, he had given the young chester A.
Arthur all of his cases. But Arthur, who was twenty
four at the time, would later go on to become
the twenty first President of the United States, and he

(14:23):
was a strong ally. He had been Culver's apprentice, and
he was ideologically aligned with his mentor. And Arthur filed
a suit on behalf of Elizabeth Jennings in the New
York State Supreme Court, seeking damages from the conductor, the driver,
and the Third Avenue Railway Company. But this was not
just about getting recompense for Elizabeth. The hope was that

(14:46):
this lawsuit, which was filed as a civil case rather
than a criminal case, would change the company stance on
segregated street cars. If the Third Avenue Railway Company lost.
Thomas Jennings wrote of the case, quote, the assault, though
very aggravated, case is only secondary in our view to
the rights of our people. He also made the point

(15:06):
that it was mere custom that kept black people on
segregated street cars. There was no actual law that said
that people of any color couldn't sit on any street
car they wished. That's one of the big uh, not
not continual, but but frequently differences between segregation in the
North and the South is that a lot of times
in the South there were laws specifically saying all these things,

(15:28):
and in the North it was more common that these
were sort of socially enforced but not actually documented anywhere.
At a literary exhibition held at the First Colored American
Congregational Church in the fall of that year, Elizabeth played
the organ and as part of the programming, speeches were
given in support of overthrowing slavery and and bettering the
lives of black people. Events like this continued to garner

(15:51):
support for her case in the community while they waited
for a court date. Yeah, and as this news was
spreading throughout the country, she was receiving let of support
from around the United States in the case of Elizabeth
Jennings versus Third Avenue Railway Company went to trial the
following year, on February. The case was filed and tried

(16:14):
in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan, because the company was headquartered
there and that courtroom was packed. The records of the
court proceedings are unfortunately lost. Uh It is believed that
the German bookseller that we mentioned earlier, Elizabeth's friends, Sarah
Thomas Jennings, and Elizabeth herself were all witnesses. They all testified,
of course, before a jury that consisted entirely of white men.

(16:38):
After the testimony, Judge William Rockwell's instructions to the jury
made it clear that a company was legally responsible for
the actions of its employees. He also stated that as
a public transportation business, the Third Avenue Railway Company was
quote bound to carry all respectable persons that colored persons,
if sober, well behaved and free firm disease, had the

(17:00):
same rights as others. Those instructions made news, and they
were printed in the papers after the trial. And while
they do represent an important moment, which was a State
Supreme Court judge saying that people of color had the
same rights as others. There are also a lot of
qualifiers on those rights, basically saying that to be entitled
to those same rights, they had to be the right

(17:22):
kind of black people. Yeah. Uh. But after deliberation, the
jury returned to the courtroom and the lead juror handed
the judge in the case their decision, and the paper
read quote, the jury has awarded miss Jennings two dollars
plus ten percent for court costs, So they had won.
This was less than half of the amount that they

(17:43):
had filed for, which was five dollars, but it was
also what Elizabeth made in a full year at her job,
and it was greeted as a huge win, not just
for the Jennings but for New York's black community. We'll
talk about what happened after the trial after we take
a break for a word from a sponsor, Frederick Douglass Paper,

(18:09):
which was actually the name uh he had changed the
north star to. It was literally called Frederick Douglass Paper. Uh.
He made that change. In eighteen fifty one ran the
story of Jenning's successful court case with the headline legal
rights vindicated and opening with quote, our readers will rejoice
with us in the righteous verdict given. Other papers across

(18:31):
the country also picked up the story, including Judge Rockwell's words.
The Pacific Appeal, which is a paper published in San Francisco,
ran the story with the headline quote a wholesome verdict.
The final paragraph takes the tone of the write up
in an interesting direction. It hints that the writer was
more concerned with people bringing their stinky groceries onto street
cars and then whether a passenger is black. It reads, quote, railroads, steamboats, omnibuses,

(18:57):
and ferry boats will be admonished from this As to
the rights of respectable colored people, it is high time
that the rights of this class of citizens were ascertained,
and that it should be known whether they are to
be thrust from our public conveyances while women with a
quarter of mutton or a load of cod fish can
be admitted. That kind of cracked me up. Uh. That

(19:20):
headline A wholesome verdict, and the basic story ran in
a bunch of different papers. It's kind of like, uh,
you know, if you'll see an ap story repeated throughout
multiple papers today. Very similarly, the same story ran word
for word in a lot of places. But soon after
this case was settled, the Third Avenue Railroad Company did
start integrating its street cars, and other companies followed suit.

(19:42):
But for clarity, it was not as though they had
seen the light and believed that this was the right
thing to do. This was a business decision. They were
really fearful that more lawsuits could follow and that they
would start hemorrhaging money if more juries made similar decisions.
There were a handful of similar cases over the next
two years. While companies were integrating their street cars, it

(20:03):
wasn't as though conductors all stopped being racist due to
those changes. After the ruling, Thomas Jennings founded the Legal
Rights Association. This organization is sometimes called a precursor to
then double a CP, and it was an advocacy group
that helped black New Yorkers find and pay for legal
representation in civil rights cases. It also lobbied for fair

(20:23):
treatment of people of color. It organized protests and educated
the public. Thomas Jennings died four years after Elizabeth's court
case in eighteen fifty nine. Unfortunately, he did not live
long enough to see uh some of the many things
that he had fought so hard for. In eighteen sixty,
Elizabeth met and married a man named Charles Graham, who

(20:46):
was from St. Croix. Elizabeth and Charles had a son
in eighteen sixty two, named in honor of Elizabeth's father, Thomas,
but unfortunately, Thomas died in infancy just a year after
his birth. Uh. The only thing that I have found
one that seems to ever be written up as the
cause of his death is convulsions. Um, so we don't
know the exact nature of his illness. Charles and Elizabeth

(21:09):
actually traveled with Thomas's body from Manhattan to its burial
place in Brooklyn, and that was actually a trip that
was very, very dangerous at this time because the Civil
War draft riots were taking place in the city. The Graham's,
along with Elizabeth's mother, left the city after that and
they moved to New Jersey. Charles Graham died in eighteen
sixty seven. He was only thirty four and he and

(21:30):
Elizabeth had only been married for seven years. Elizabeth and
her mother continued to live together in the Eton Town
area for the next several years. In eighteen seventy one,
the Jennings women moved back to Lower Manhattan, this time
into a home at five forty three Broom Street. In
eighteen seventies three, Elizabeth's mother died, and Elizabeth had continued

(21:51):
to work as a teacher throughout her life, but after
losing her child, her husband, and her mother in the
course of a decade, teaching children became pretty much the
entire focus of her life. Elizabeth Jennings Graham moved once
more after her mother's death, this time to a house
at two thirty seven West forty one Street, which was
closer to the school where she worked. In eighteen eighty one,

(22:13):
Chester A. Arthur became president when President James A. Garfield
was assassinated, and his rise to the highest office in
US government kicked up a bit of interest in the
eighteen fifty five court case again, but Elizabeth did not
seem particularly interested in stepping into the spotlight. In her
home on West forty one Street became the site of

(22:34):
the first free kindergarten for black children in New York.
She also continued to live there, but she lived on
the upper floor and had the school downstairs, and she
was not alone in setting up this kindergarten. She worked
with two other women, Mrs James Herbert Morse and Mrs
Edward Curtis, and the idea of kindergarten, which was really
more supervised play than you know, book learning, so to speak,

(22:57):
was still relatively new. It had been developed in the
eighteen thirties in Germany, but even sixty years later, though
private and then public kindergartens had been established in some
cities in the US, there still were not any in
New York for black children. Prior to this. I wish
we knew her colleagues names beyond their husband's name. That

(23:20):
happened sometimes when we're researching this far back in the past.
So this was not a situation that it was like
a daycare running out of Elizabeth's home. The school had
a structure, It was funded through donors, and a teacher
named Leoni g Ricord was hired to manage the curriculum.
The lower level of the home was made into a
school room, and the yard was transformed into an outdoor

(23:42):
activity area. Elizabeth Jennings Graham also ran a lending library
out of the house. She was also the librarian, and
on Saturdays the classroom was used as a sewing school.
I love how busy she was with all of these
endeavors well, and she really was kind of carrying on
her father's legacy of like trying to help people help

(24:04):
themselves by becoming more educated and more skilled and more knowledgeable.
And it's a that family has some pretty good, uh
pretty good values. So Elizabeth died in her sleep on
June five, nine one, in her home, so that was
six years after she started the school. She worked literally
right up until the day she died. She was in
her seventies at the time. She was buried in Cypress

(24:26):
Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn. In two thousand seven, a small
street marker appeared on the corner of Park Row and
Spruce Street that read Elizabeth Jennings Place. It's not the
exact intersection where she was assaulted, but it is nearby
that spot and in a fitting full circle moment for
somebody who dedicated her professional career to teaching. It is

(24:48):
the work of school children. Third and fourth grade students
from New York's PS three sixty one had been studying
Elizabeth Jennings Graham and they got the idea to try
to have her commemorated. And this was not the first
time this happened. There was a previous class that attempted
something similar but was not successful. But the kids collected
signatures from area residents, and then with the help of

(25:09):
their teachers, they put together their case to petition the city,
and after trying to have first a playground named for
her which did not pan out Um and then selecting
the intersection where she had boarded that street car, but
finding it had already been given an honorarily designation, that
alternate corner was chosen by city officials, but it was
approved by the students and their teachers. So she does

(25:30):
have small little recognition, a little sign that you will
see if you are at the corner of Um Park,
Row and Spruce, because some of those streets have also
changed names from when she was there. They so much
for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is

(25:53):
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(26:15):
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