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Get
On The Bus: 150 Years After Elizabeth Jennings / 100 Years Before Rosa
Parks Copyright © 2004, Mickey Z. All Rights Reserved. On
the mornings I board the Q101 bus from Queens to Manhattan, it's not
uncommon for the majority of my fellow riders to be people of color.
This is an unremarkable observation in 2004 New York where integrated
buses are hardly news...thanks to Rosa Parks and her spontaneous act
of bravery. Well,
that's what we're taught, aren't we? However, to buy into the Rosa Parks
mythology* not only involves ignoring some crucial history about 1955,
it erases the name of Elizabeth "Lizzie" Jennings from Big
Apple lore. It
was 150 years ago last week that Jennings, a 24-year-old schoolteacher
setting out to fulfill her duties as organist at the First Colored Congregational
Church on Sixth Street and Second Avenue, fatefully waited for the bus
on the corner of Pearl and Chatham. Getting around 1854 New York City
often involved paying a fare to board a large horse drawn carriage...the
forerunner to today's behemoth motorized buses. For black New Yorkers
like Jennings, it wasn't that simple. Pre-Civil
War Manhattan may have been home to the nation's largest African-American
population and New York's black residents may have paid taxes and owned
property, but riding the bus with whites, well, that was a different
story. Some buses bore large "Colored Persons Allowed" signs,
while all other buses-those without the sign-were governed by a rather
arbitrary system of passenger choice. "Drivers
determined who could ride," journalist Jasmin K. Williams explains,
adding that NYC bus drivers "carried whips to keep undesirable
passengers off." This unfortunate arrangement was the focus of
a burgeoning movement for public transportation equality with Rev. J.W.C.
Pennington of the First Colored Congregational Church (where Jennings
just so happened to play the organ) playing a major role. Against
such a volatile backdrop, Lizzie Jennings opted for a bus *without*
the "Colored Persons Allowed" sign on July 16, 1854. The New
York Tribune described what happened next: "She got upon one of
the Company's cars...on the Sabbath, to ride to church. The conductor
undertook to get her off, first alleging the car was full; when that
was shown to be false, he pretended the other passengers were displeased
at her presence; but (when) she insisted on her rights, he took hold
of her by force to expel her. She resisted." The outraged Jennings told the conductor she was "a respectable person, born and raised in this city," calling him "a good-for-nothing, impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church." The
Tribune picks up the story from there: "The conductor got her down
on the platform, jammed her bonnet, soiled her dress and injured her
person. Quite a crowd gathered, but she effectually resisted. Finally,
after the car had gone on further, with the aid of a policeman they
succeeded in removing her." This
would not be the end of it for, like Rosa Parks, Jennings' behavior
was no impetuous act of resistance. "Jennings was well connected,"
says Williams. "Her father was an important businessman and community
leader with ties to the two major black churches in the city."
Not satisfied with the massive rally that took place the following day
at her church, Elizabeth Jennings hired the law firm of Culver, Parker
& Arthur and took the Third Avenue Railway Company to court. In
a classic "who knew?" situation, Jennings was represented
by a 24-year-old lawyer named Chester A. Arthur...yes, he who would
go on to become the 21st president upon the death of James A. Garfield
in 1881. The trial took place in the bus company's home base of Brooklyn-then
a separate city-where, in early 1855, Judge William Rockwell of the
Brooklyn Circuit Court ruled in the black schoolteacher's favor...in
that 1855 sort of way: "Colored persons if sober, 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,"
Rockwell declared. Jennings
claimed $500 worth of damages but as the Tribune put it, "Some
jury members had peculiar notions as to colored people's rights,"
and she ended up with $225, plus another $22.50 for court costs. Regardless,
just one day after the verdict, the Third Avenue Railway Company issued
an order to admit African-Americans onto their buses. By
1860, all of the city's street and rail cars were desegregated...and
Elizabeth Jennings had married Charles Graham. She was still teaching
in New York's African-American schools. Her struggles, however, were
far from over. Thanks
to a July 1863 resolution called the Union Conscription Act, any New
Yorker with a spare $300 was able to buy his way out of the Civil War
draft. Resentment over such favoritism soon turned into rioting by poor
whites. "The crowd's anger (had) two sources," explains historian
Kenneth C. Davis, "the idea of fighting to free the slaves, and
the unfairness of the ability of the wealthy to avoid conscription."
The ensuing "Draft Riots" saw over 70 African-Americans lynched.
There were other, lesser-known victims...like Thomas J. Graham, one-year-old
son of Elizabeth and Charles. Circumstances surrounded the child's death
remain unclear but author John Hewitt, who has researched Jennings's
life, believes young Thomas died of "convulsions" as the rioting
and violence played out on the streets outside his home. Although calm had yet to be restored to her city, Elizabeth Graham boldly solicited the help of a white undertaker and managed to get her son's body to Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery for a proper burial. Elizabeth Jennings-Graham died in 1901...and I seriously doubt many of my co-commuters on the Q101 have ever heard of her. *Elizabeth Jennings' spiritual progeny was also "well-connected," having spent twelve years leading her local NAACP chapter. The summer before she refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, Parks "attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning 'separate-but-equal' schools," writes journalist Paul Loeb. "In short," he says, "Parks didn't make a spur-of-the-moment decision." In her 1991 book, "My Story," Parks writes: "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in." END
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