The 1863 draft riots are a significant historical event in their own right. They were sparked by opposition to the Civil War draft and took on the character of a racial pogrom, with white working-class men targeting Black New Yorkers across the city, destroying property and killing people. The riots were not an incident at the margins of New York life; they were a week-long catastrophe that killed dozens and injured hundreds, displaced thousands of Black New Yorkers from their neighborhoods, and demonstrated how thin the protection of law and policy could be when mob violence was the alternative enforcement mechanism.
In that context, the legal right to ride a streetcar — even where companies had formally desegregated — could be functionally suspended by the threat of violence. What happened in the cars was not separable from what happened in the streets.
Ellen Anderson’s 1864 case is an important marker in the later desegregation effort. Anderson, a widow of a soldier who had served in the U.S. Colored Troops, was removed from a streetcar on Eighth Avenue after the civil rights policy of that line had been nominally established. She sued and won. Her case, coming after years of organizing and litigation, brought additional public pressure and helped consolidate the gains that the post-Jennings campaign had been building toward.
Some accounts point to 1873 as the date when a New York state statute formally prohibited discrimination on streetcars — making the prohibition a matter of legislation rather than just common law and court-by-court litigation. If that is the relevant end point, then the journey from Elizabeth Jennings’s 1855 verdict to formal statutory protection was eighteen years. The verdicts and company policy changes in the intervening years were real and cumulative; they were also not the same as a binding legislative rule.