The riots also serve as a reminder that the civil rights history of New York in the nineteenth century is not a story of gradual, linear improvement. It contained regressions, crises, and moments when the question of whether the city was moving toward or away from equality was genuinely unclear.
## Ellen Anderson and the Later Campaign
Ellen Anderson’s 1864 case — brought a year after the draft riots, when New York’s Black community was still recovering from the violence and displacement of that summer — is usually described as an important late chapter in the streetcar desegregation campaign.
Anderson was a widow of a soldier who had served in the United States Colored Troops, the segregated Black Union Army units that were fighting and dying for a country that still excluded them from streetcars in its largest city. The juxtaposition was pointed: a woman whose husband had given his life in the Union cause was refused a seat on a streetcar on Eighth Avenue.
She brought a lawsuit. She won. The outcome, combined with the sustained organizing pressure that had been building since 1855, helped consolidate the changes that had been proceeding line by line since the Jennings verdict. Some accounts describe 1865 as the year when New York’s streetcar system was fully desegregated in practice. Others point to 1873 and state legislation as the formal legal endpoint.
What the Anderson case demonstrates is that the organizing that began around Elizabeth Jennings’s incident in 1854 continued for a decade and more, building on each victory and each setback, shifting the terrain incrementally rather than producing a single decisive transformation.