The New York Draft Riots of July 1863 — the violent uprising against the Civil War draft that became a days-long assault on Black New Yorkers and their institutions — directly touched her life. On July 16, 1863 — exactly nine years after the streetcar incident — Thomas J. Graham died. He was one year old. Contemporary records describe the cause of death as convulsions.
The family buried Thomas J. Graham in Cypress Hills Cemetery with the help of a sympathetic white undertaker. The Reverend Morgan Dix of Trinity Church read the funeral service. The details that have survived about this burial suggest a family navigating even grief through a network of relationships carefully maintained across racial lines in a city convulsed by anti-Black violence.
After the draft riots, Elizabeth and her mother moved to Monmouth County, New Jersey, to live with her sister Matilda. Charles Graham died in 1867 in New Jersey. Elizabeth returned to New York City sometime in the late 1860s or 1870.
## The Kindergarten
In the last decades of her life, Elizabeth Jennings Graham — she continued to use both surnames — ran what is described as the first kindergarten for Black children in New York City, operated from her home at 247 West 41st Street.
She ran this kindergarten for more than twenty years, until her death. It was not a famous institution in the way that her 1855 legal victory was a famous case. It was a sustained, daily act of educational investment in the children of her community, funded and managed from a private residence by a woman who had spent her adult life as a teacher and believed that early education mattered.