[Elizabeth Jennings]
The Schoolteacher=s Stand
By
Katharine Greider
for American
Legacy, Summer 2006,, pp.12,14,16.
During
the decade before the Civil War, no purpose was dearer to the black leaders of
New York City than that of ending slavery in the SouthC Ato aim the severing blow at the chattel relation
between master and slave, without parley, palliation or compromise," as
the New York City pastor J. W. C. Pennington put it. Maybe that's why
most Americans know so little about black New Yorkers' struggles to secure
their own future in that harsh antebellum metropolis.
If
every schoolchild can imagine Harriet Tubman finding her way to freedom by the
light of the North Star, few have pictured her urban contemporary Elizabeth
Jennings during her time of testing. On the afternoon of July 16, 1854,
dressed for church in bonnet and full-skirted frock, the young schoolteacher
walked with a friend from her parents' home in downtown Manhattan
to the thronged intersection of Pearl and Chatham streets. At that
moment, even Jennings
herself could not have known that she was about to make a fierce and principled
stand.
She was probably more
concerned about being late. It was Sunday, and Jennings was due at the First Colored American
Congregational Church, on Sixth
Street, where she served as organist. A horsedrawn streetcar clattered up. Jennings saw no sign on the vehicle declaring
"Negro Persons Allowed in this Car," a sign that would grant her
access. She stuck out her hand and hailed it anyway.
According to Jennings's own account, published three days after the
incident in the New York
Tribune, as soon as she and her friend Sarah Adams climbed aboard, the
conductor objected. Off you go, he insisted. Jennings demurred. He told her he would wait
her out. "Very well, we'll see," she replied. Finally the conductor
told Jennings
and her companion they could ride but that if any white passenger complained,
"you shall go out . . . or I'll put you out." Jennings
told the conductor that she 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. This young black
woman had thrown down the gauntlet.
The conductor quickly
removed Adams from the car, then seized Jennings. She held on to
a window frame and, when he broke her grasp, clung to the conductor's own coat.
He called to the driver, who hitched his horses. The two men hauled the
24-year-old Jennings
from the car. But as soon as they released her, she climbed aboard once again.
"You shall sweat for this," the conductor vowed, instructing the
driver to move on, taking no passengers, until they could find a police
officer. It was an officer of the law who finally thrust Jennings to the curb, her bonnet crumpled and
her dress dirty. As a parting shot, Jennings
would recount, the police officer "tauntingly told me to get redress if I
could."
Jennings's abusers might not have been so confident had they
known that they had just manhandled one of the best connected young black women
in New York.
Jennings was "of a good old New York stock," to quote Frederick
Douglass' Paper; her African-born grandfather had served in the Revolution,
and her father, Thomas L. Jennings, was an abolitionist merchant tailor who had
helped found the celebrated Abyssinian Baptist Church. He also gave addresses
at important gatherings of black New Yorkers, such as the city's 1827
emancipation celebration. Elizabeth Jennings herself had taught in the two
black schools cofounded by the Underground Railroad
"conductor" Charles B. Ray and Charles L. Reason, the latter a
mathematician who during his long career fought on just about every front in
the battle for black civil rights. And the church where Jennings had been headed that midsummer day
of 1854, the First Colored American, was a place of worship spiced with sharp
political commentary. At one evening's assembly that year, talks on the Bible
and God were interspersed with addresses with titles like "Elevation of
the African Race" and "The Duty of Colored People towards the
overthrow of American Slavery." "Miss Elizabeth Jennings," the
program read, "will preside at the Organ."
It was to this extended
family that Jennings
recounted her experience on the Third
Avenue streetcar. Her written statement detailing
the incident was read in church the next day, though
she was too "sore and stiff" to attend. The gathering adopted a
resolution to alert Frederick Douglass' Paper, published by the great
orator himself, and the New York Tribune, the
daily newspaper of the abolitionist Horace Greeley, both of which reprinted Jennings's account.
Thomas Jennings went
forthwith to a law firm on Broadway that was sympathetic to the abolitionist
cause; it assigned one Chester A. Arthur to the case. In 1881 Arthur
would rise to be President of the United States,
but when he took Jennings's
case he had been a member of the bar for a scant two months. And yet he won the
case against the Third Avenue Railway Company when a Brooklyn
judge found that black people could not be barred from public transit "by
any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence." After the decision, Greeley's Tribune noted,
"Railroads, steamboats, omnibuses, and ferry-boats will be admonished from
this, as to the rights of respectable colored people. It is high time 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 German or
Irish women, with a quarter of mutton or a load of codfish, can be
admitted."
The decades after New York mandated
emancipation, in 1827, had been in many ways disappointing, even terrifying, for
the city's black residents. The Tribune's remark about German and Irish
women expressed the mounting tension between African-Americans and new
immigrants, especially the impoverished Irish, who competed with blacks for
jobs. Pushed from many trades, African-Americans were hard-pressed to earn a
living. Meanwhile, new laws severely limited black suffrage while upholding the
right of Southern slaveholders to haul their human property back across the Mason-Dixon line. Still, New York was a center of
black activism and culture. Even if white institutions from schools to museums
were declared off-limits to them, black New Yorkers refused to be denied access
to the city itself. The streetcars and ferries on which that access
increasingly depended became a hotly contested proving ground.
In fact, the right of
African-Americans to ride on public transportation was an issue cities up and
down the Eastern Seaboard wrestled with. In 1838 The Colored American urged
blacks to boycott New York's
segregated transportation services:
"Brethren, you are MEN -if you have not horses
and vehicles of your own to travel with, stay at home, or travel on foot. Cease
giving your money to men, who forbear not to degrade you beneath the
dogs." Soon afterward, Frederick Douglass was ejected from a railroad car
in Massachusetts.
Sojourner Truth tussled with a conductor in Washington,
D.C., during the Civil War; and in a meeting
in Rhode Island in the late 1840s, the abolitionist
New Yorker Henry
Highland Garnet remarked,
"For my part, I generally hug. the seats and
sometimes they go with me as a whole or in part. If every colored man molested
on our railroads would give his assailants an affectionate embrace; after the
mode of the grizzly bear, these upstarts would become weary of such
manifestations of brotherly love."
Jennings's case against the Third Avenue line didn't immediately
integrate New York City's
transit system. But black New Yorkers actively tested her precedent, most
notably through the Legal Rights Association, which her father co-founded for
that purpose. Writing in Frederick Douglass' Paper, J. W. C. Pennington
urged blacks visiting the city during the May 1855 annual meetings of
anti-slavery societies and other groups to report any breaches of the new law.
"Ask no questions, but get in and have your five cents ready to pay. Don't
let them frighten you with words; the law is right and so is the public
sentiment."
Pennington himself was
thrown off the Sixth Avenue
line not long afterward, and lost in a separate lawsuit against the rail
company. But another case brought by Thomas Jennings's Legal Rights Association
was resolved in a settlement, and by 1860 most of the city's railway lines were
open to African-Americans.
As for Elizabeth Jennings,
the particulars of her long and fruitful life have been most thoroughly
reported by the scholar John H. Hewitt, whose profile of her appeared in 1990
in the journal of the New York State Historical Association. In 1863 her city
erupted in violence, as largely Irish and German rioters vented. their fury at a new conscription law on two groups that
symbolized the war they opposed: representatives of government and
African-Americans. They burned and killed. But during the Draft Riots,
Elizabeth and her husband, Charles Graham, were likely at home on Broome Street,
Hewitt tells us, praying for the recovery of their year-old son, Thomas. The
baby died of convulsions, the grim conclusion, perhaps, to his having
contracted an infectious disease. With the city streets still full of peril,
the couple managed to spirit his body to Brooklyn for burial at Cypress Hills Cemetery.
Elizabeth Jennings Graham
devoted her last years to the goal she had pursued since she was a young woman,
the education of black children. In her own house at 237 West Forty-first Street,
she opened the city's first kindergarten for African Americans. "The
children,@ a women's journal reported, "are either seated
at their desks, engaged in some handiwork adapted to their tiny fingers, or
playing one of their beautiful games. . . their faces
glowing with interest."
As the twentieth century
dawnedC the year was 1901C
Jennings Graham died at home in the city where she was born, which she left a
far better place than she had found it.
--------------------------
Katharine Greider's writing has appeared in many publications,
including the Los Angeles Times and The
New York Times. A different version of this article appeared in The New
York Times.