Right to Ride

Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson

Blair L. M. Kelley

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807895818
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Through a reexamination of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, Blair Kelley exposes the fullness of African American efforts to resist the passage of segregation laws dividing trains and streetcars by race in the early Jim Crow era. Right to Ride chronicles the litigation and local organizing against segregated rails that led to the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and the streetcar boycott movement waged in twenty-five southern cities from 1900 to 1907. Kelley tells the stories of the brave but little-known men and women who faced down the violence of lynching and urban race riots to contest segregation. Focusing on three key cities--New Orleans, Richmond, and Savannah--Kelley explores the community organizations that bound protestors together and the divisions of class, gender, and ambition that sometimes drove them apart. The book forces a reassessment of the timelines of the black freedom struggle, revealing that a period once dismissed as the age of accommodation should in fact be characterized as part of a history of protest and resistance.

1 NEW YORK

The Antebellum Roots of Segregation and Dissent

The most iconic decision in the history of segregation in America is Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Supreme Court institutionalized legal segregation, making the phrase “separate but equal” the new standard. Indeed, Plessy opened the floodgates of southern segregation. Plessy’s prominence, however, has left many people with the mistaken notion that segregation began at that moment and that it was really just a southern problem. Lost is the collective understanding that Jim Crow segregation began long before Plessy and far from the trains of New Orleans.

This chapter traces the roots of segregation and resistance, outlining one of the earliest collective movements of black citizens against segregated streetcars.¹ In New York City, the heart of urban America in 1854, Elizabeth Jennings, a young schoolteacher and church organist, was ejected from a white car on her way to church. Her suit against the Third Avenue Railway Company and the movement that it spurred reverberate with the challenges faced by the black southerners who tried to halt de jure segregation fifty years later. Black opposition to segregation began at the same moment that segregation itself began: free black people throughout the urban North sought to establish their rights as passengers on public conveyances. That this generation of abolitionists, still fighting to end the enslavement of millions, also contested segregation tells us a great deal about the importance of mobility, dignity, and the freedom from public violence. This story stands as a reminder that African Americans in all parts of the nation found segregation abhorrent.

Their legacy of dissent would be remembered when sympathetic law-makers sought to shape the law to protect black public citizenship after the Civil War. However, this history also served as a template for the next generation of African Americans crafting their own meanings of freedom, citizenship, and equality in the postwar South. Black northerners were the first emancipated citizens—that is, the first former slaves to try to map out the meanings of freedom. Northern segregation taught African Americans that freedom was not the same as equality. And it was this generation that would serve as examples for the next when black northerners, along with their institutions and outlook, traveled South after the Civil War.

Antebellum African American passengers who fought for full and equitable inclusion did not seek special treatment or unusual protection but instead desired equitable recognition of their personhood, an extension of their work as antislavery advocates. Equal access to trains, streetcars, and ferryboats went beyond travel; it became fundamental, a test of the quality and character of black citizenship. If black urbanites did not belong on public conveyances, then not only was their mobility limited physically, but they were symbolically blocked from the social mobility promised by American life. Segregation was a mark of race slavery, a public signifier that stigmatized black people both slave and free. Their willingness to protest segregation in that moment was significant. Even when standing at the margins of American citizenship, battling for the right to vote, and seeking decent housing and education for their children, all while working to end slavery and aid the enslaved, they saw their equal right to ride as a crucial question. They were willing to gather their meager funds and sue, to risk their safety to sit in spaces set aside for whites, and organize to make change. Their dignity was not expendable. When black Americans fought for seats on trains and streetcars, they fought for public recognition of their citizenship. Decades before Plessy v. Ferguson, segregation and protest had a long and tangled history, highlighting the meanings of race, citizenship, and urban life throughout the nation.

SEGREGATION WAS NOT a southern invention. It belonged to no one region; it was an American phenomenon. The name “Jim Crow” became synonymous with the inferior, racially segregated train cars designated for black passengers, first in the antebellum North and later in the postwar South. As the black-faced minstrel character played by the white performer Thomas “Daddy” Rice, Jim Crow was an uncouth, uncultured, humorously dangerous runaway slave, insistent on barging in on the white world. Jim Crow was a traveler; in Rice’s performances, Jim Crow could frequently be found riding in otherwise elegant trains, streetcars, and steamboats. Dressed in tattered traveling clothes, Jim Crow imagined himself escorting his wife in the ladies’ car of a train: he sang “I tink I see myself on a Rail Road, wid a wife upon my arm, an to foller up de fashum, dare sure can be no harm.”²

White audiences made Rice’s minstrel performances enormously popular in the 1830s, marking the consciousness of America with the image of the black intruder. The racial segregation of public conveyances in the 1840s was designed to prevent these sorts of transgressions of the social order. The Jim Crow car was the place to shunt black passengers, a place where the “uncivilized negro” of white imaginations could be prevented from mingling with whites.

The early attempts to segregate or exclude black passengers met with dissent from black Americans across the nation. Not only were free blacks in the cities of the antebellum South regularly ejected from streetcars and omnibuses, but black abolitionists traveling in northern states were also thrown from railcars and cabins set aside for white passengers.³ Massachusetts was the first state where the term “Jim Crow” was used to describe segregated cars in the 1840s. With the support of antislavery activists, black abolitionists David Ruggles and Frederick Douglass vigorously protested these segregated cars. Douglass, in fact, began his political life as a leading opponent of segregation. Calling the Jim Crow car a “custom . . . fostering the spirit of caste,” Douglass described his physical battle for change on the railways of New England in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).

When traveling, Douglass insisted on sitting in the first-class car even though he was “often dragged out of my seat, beaten, and severely bruised, by conductors and brakemen.” He once so thoroughly resisted being moved, weaving his hands and arms into the upholstery of his seat, that when he was grabbed by several men on the “head, neck, and shoulders” and ripped from his place on the train, it “must have cost the company twenty-five or thirty dollars, for I tore up seats and all.” After years of individual and collective protest New England railcars were desegregated.⁴ Douglass, who fought for freedom from slavery on the Underground Railroad, also had to battle to ride the public rails.⁵ In the next decade, the fight against policies would take on a more collective tone on New York City’s mule-drawn omnibuses, or streetcars.

On 16 July 1854, a Sunday, the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Jennings, and her friend, Sarah E. Adams, attempted to ride the Third Avenue streetcar to the First Colored American Congregational Church on Sixth Street in Manhattan. Company policy directed black passengers to ride on the dangerous outside platforms, although African Americans were occasionally allowed on board if no white passengers objected. This particular line also had cars for the use of black riders, which bore signs that read, “Colored people allowed in this car,” but they filled quickly with black passengers uninterested in paying for rides on the dangerous outside platform.⁶ Jennings was well dressed and well behaved and considered herself a lady and a member of the city’s educated black middle class. She was accustomed to riding inside the cars on the Third Avenue line without trouble, but that afternoon, she encountered a conductor who insisted on removing her.

Jennings was not the first black woman to be treated violently on the city cars; a black woman had been violently ejected from a Harlem Railroad streetcar just one year earlier.⁷ However, Jennings was the first to sue the streetcar company and win. Fortuitous circumstances brought Jennings and her successful lawsuit to the forefront of protest led by black New Yorkers and the interracial abolitionist community.⁸ The incident and legal case pitted Jennings against a vague and discriminatory policy that privileged the preferences of white conductors over the rights of African American riders.

After hailing one streetcar, Jennings, who was late for an engagement at the church, was told that there was no more room on the car and that she would need to get off and “wait for the next car,” which had been set aside for black use. When she looked inside the first car, however, she saw only eight passengers, leaving more than enough room for Jennings and Adams. Jennings informed the conductor that because she was in a hurry, she wished to ride on the car that was available. When the conductor explained that “the other car had [her] people in it,” Jennings replied that she “had no people” and was not traveling with any party, intentionally ignoring the conductor’s assumption that she should ride with other black passengers. Jennings explained to the conductor, “I wished to go to church as I had been going for the last six months, and I did not wish to be detained.” The car had available space and no white passengers had voiced any complaint. Jennings waited inside the car, ignoring the conductor, who continued to insist that she get off and wait on the curb.⁹

When the “colored” car arrived, the second driver told Jennings there was no room. The first conductor nevertheless continued to insist that he would not leave until Jennings and Adams exited. Growing angry, the conductor warned Jennings that if any white passenger complained about her presence, he would put her out. Jennings responded that she was within her rights, asserting her citizenship while questioning that of the conductor: “I answered again and told him I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, did not know where he was born, that I had never been insulted before while going to church, and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church.” Jennings continued, “When I told the conductor I did not know where he was born, he answered, ‘I was born in Ireland.’ I made answer it made no difference where a man was born, that he was none the worse or the better for that, provided he behaved himself and did not insult genteel persons.”¹⁰

Jennings was a third-generation New Yorker. Frederick Douglass’ Paper described her as coming from “a good old New York stock.”¹¹ Her grandfather was Jacob Cartwright, an African slave turned Revolutionary War patriot, and her father was Thomas L. Jennings, a tailor, a boardinghouse operator, and one of the founders of the New York African Society for Mutual Relief.¹² Grounded in an understanding of her family history, personal achievement, and contributions to her community, Jennings saw herself not as a second-class citizen stigmatized by slavery but as a respectable member of her community and her city. Evoking the memory of her grandfather as a soldier and patriot, Jennings made her status as a “native” New Yorker and her heritage of citizenship the basis for her dissent.

In the weeks following the incident, Jennings’s defenders also framed their arguments in terms of citizenship and respectability. Stories detailing her case highlighted her status as a lady, describing her as a young Christian woman traveling to church and contrasting her gentility with the “ruffianly Irish driver.”¹³ The abolitionist daily New York Tribune asserted, “It is high time the rights of [respectable colored] 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.”¹⁴ By emphasizing her status, they hinted that segregation along the color line was ridiculous when no segregation along class lines was enforced.

This argument did little to advocate for poor or working-class black women carrying their own loads on the same cars. Working-class women, who often traveled great distances in the city for their work, would have benefited from fair use of the cars as well. An anonymous letter to the New York Daily Times reported that the author’s black housekeeper walked several miles from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back again to travel to and from work in the heat and cold. When her employer asked “why she did not ride in the cars or omnibus she said she did not like to do it, for ‘they made such a fuss about colored folks riding in them.’ ” The writer described the housekeeper as a “worthy citizen” and a “tax-payer” and insisted that women like her also ought to be able to use the cars in comfort and dignity.¹⁵ While Jennings’s status as a lady provided one rationale for resisting segregation, working-class black women had no such cover. Only a complete revision of the discriminatory policies, without regard for class, would allow them to find seats as well.

Fed up, the conductor violently removed Adams and then attempted to eject Jennings from the car, dragging her by the feet across the platform while she “screamed murder with all [her] voice.” Jennings resisted until the conductor flagged down a passing policeman, who booted her without asking what had happened. When Jennings protested, the policeman told her to “seek redress if she could.”¹⁶ Using family, professional, and civic connections, Jennings did just that, garnering support from sympathetic whites and the abolitionist community.

A meeting was called at the First Colored American Congregational Church to discuss the incident. Jennings’s detailed account of the assault on the car was read aloud to the congregants because her injuries prevented her from attending the meeting. Those in attendance resolved to sue on her behalf and to “demand . . . as colored citizens, the equal right to the accommodation of ‘transit’ in the cars.” Jennings had a strong case; not only was she a dignified woman whom employees of the rail line had brutally attacked, but also her side of the story would be bolstered by the testimony of a white onlooker who witnessed the incident from the street, a German immigrant who worked as a bookseller in the neighborhood. He followed Jennings after the assault and offered support if she carried her case to the courts.¹⁷

The testimony of a neutral white observer backed up Jennings’s statements and demonstrated that some white passengers had no problem sharing the cars. But her greatest moral support came from black people who had suffered similar insults. A letter came from as far away as California, where the Young Men’s Association of San Francisco resolved that “even from the distant shores of the Pacific, that we, with them, do, and will ever protest against this [injustice], and resist it by all proper means, by appealing to justice and importuning public sentiment, until we secure our rights.”¹⁸

In the effort to organize a test case, Thomas L. Jennings, Elizabeth’s father, penned an “appeal to the citizens of color, male and female of the city and state of New York.” The elder Jennings spoke not only as an aggrieved father but also as a citizen interested in exposing an unfair policy that did not carry the force of law. He argued that he was “not aware of any difference in the law of this State in relation to persons of color, except the elective franchise.” He hoped that the case would clarify black rights: “What we want to know is, what our legal rights are in this matter, not only by hearsay, but by the decision of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. . . . What is law is law, and by its decision we must all be governed.” But Thomas Jennings did not want to continue to bend to exclusion: “I, for one, am not willing to submit and I hope that you all feel the same. The assault, though a very aggravated case, is only secondary in our view, to the rights of our people.” Emphasizing African Americans’ collective strength, the senior Jennings called for donations to cover the cost of legal fees: “Our opponents are rich and influential, we are the reverse, but our cause is just and we do not fear them. A willing mind with many hands makes light work.”¹⁹

Jennings’s case came to trial in February 1855 in the Brooklyn Circuit of the New York State Supreme Court. According to Chester A. Arthur, Jennings’s attorney and a future U.S. president, the case was simple.²⁰ Citing a New York state law that made common carriers liable for the actions of their employees, Arthur insisted that the employees had overstepped the bounds of custom by assaulting Jennings. Arthur asked that she be awarded damages of five hundred dollars and court costs. The Tribune reported that Judge William Rockwell charged the jury forcefully, informing them, “The Company was liable for the acts of their agents, whether committed carelessly and negligently, or willfully and maliciously. . . . They were common carriers, and as such bound to carry all respectable persons; that colored persons, if sober and well-behaved, and free from disease, had the same rights as others; and could neither be excluded by any rules of the Company, nor by force or violence; and in case of such expulsion,...