While the saga of Rosa Parks and the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott has become a canonical American parable, New York played out its own version of the same drama, more than a century earlier. In July, 1854, Lower Manhattan resident Elizabeth Jennings Graham was on her way to church, and boarded a horse-drawn street car at Chatham and Pearl Streets.
Like much else in mid-19th century New York, street car service was segregated, with most coaches reserved for white riders, but some bearing signs that read, “Negro Persons Allowed in This Car.” And although Graham did not intend to make a political point, she was running late for church, and boarded the first carriage that came to the stop where she was waiting. When the conductor ordered her off, brusquely insisting that she wait for a coach designated for African-American riders, Graham refused to move.
“He then told me that the other car… was appropriated for ‘my people,’” she wrote the following day, in a missive that captured the attention of the entire City. “I told him I had no people. I wished to go to church and I did not wish to be detained. He still kept driving me off the car; said he had as much time as I had and could wait just as long. I replied, ‘very well, we’ll see.’ He waited some minutes, when the driver becoming impatient, he said, ‘well, you may go in, but remember, if the passengers raise any objections you shall go out, whether or no, or I’ll put you out.’”
“I told him I 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,” Graham’s narrative continued. “He then said he would put me out. I told him not to lay hands on me. He took hold of me and I took hold of the window sash. He pulled me until he broke my grasp. I took hold of his coat and held onto that. He also broke my grasp from that. He then ordered the driver to fasten his horses and come and help him put me out of the cars. Both seized hold of me by the arms and pulled and dragged me down on the bottom of the platform, so that my feet hung one way and my head the other, nearly on the ground.”
The conductor, along with the driver, “thrust me out and then tauntingly told me to get redress if I could…. After dragging me off the car, he drove me away like a dog, saying not to be talking there and raising a mob or fight.”
The conductor, whose name was Moss, had tangled with the wrong woman. Graham was not only educated and articulate, but had been raised with a strong sense of justice. And she was very well connected. Her family ranked among the African-American elite of 1850s New York. Her father, Thomas Jennings, was a successful businessman with ties to intellectual and cultural leaders (both black and white) throughout New York. His 1821 invention of the garment laundering process now known as dry cleaning (which he called “dry scouring”) earned Jennings the first patent ever granted to an African-American, and made him independently wealthy. (He used much of his fortune to purchase the freedom of enslaved family members.)
Graham promptly wrote out an account of her ordeal, and passed it along to the First Methodist Congregational Colored Church, located at the Bowery and Sixth Street — the house of worship to which she had been traveling that morning. Her letter was read aloud before many hundreds of attendees, who erupted into a spontaneous protest and rally. The text was then picked up and printed in full by Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune and (more importantly), the North Star, a newspaper published by renowned abolitionist and (and former slave) Frederick Douglass. This brought the case national attention.
