The kindergarten represents something about Elizabeth Jennings’s priorities that the dramatic narrative of the courtroom doesn’t always capture: she was, before and after the lawsuit, a teacher. The transit case was the most publicly dramatic thing that happened in her life, but her work as an educator — in classrooms and in her own home, for children who lacked access to the institutions that served white New Yorkers — was the continuous thread of her professional life.
She died on June 5, 1901. Her tombstone records her age as 74, consistent with a birth in 1827. She was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn with her husband Charles and their son Thomas.
Edward Wright, who lived as her ward and whom she helped raise, went on to become an attorney. He represented Jack Johnson, the Black heavyweight boxing champion who was subject to legal persecution, and Ida B. Wells, the journalist and anti-lynching activist. The through-line from Elizabeth Jennings’s household to the civil rights legal work of the early twentieth century runs, in part, through the young man she raised.
## What the Press Said, and What It Meant
The New York Tribune’s coverage of the Jennings verdict is worth examining closely, because the Tribune’s reach in 1855 was substantial, and the framing it used shaped how the case was understood by a broad audience.
The headline “A Wholesome Verdict” positioned the outcome as a sound, correct, healthy thing — the legal system working as it should. The Tribune’s commentary argued that the verdict would instruct “railroads, steamboats, and other carriers” about the rights of Black passengers. This was an expansive claim that went beyond what the verdict technically established — it was editorializing about the precedent’s reach — but it reflected the Tribune’s antislavery editorial orientation and its interest in using the case to push a broader point.