SYMHC Classics: Elizabeth Jennings Graham

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Speaker 1: 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsoletely now. Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how Stuff Works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from i heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.