In September 2024, the Elizabeth Jennings’ School for Bold Explorers opened in Brooklyn, adding her name to a living educational institution.
## Why the Comparison to Rosa Parks Is Incomplete
Elizabeth Jennings’s story is often introduced through a comparison to Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus in December 1955, exactly a hundred years after the Jennings verdict. The comparison is understandable as an orientation for readers: both women resisted exclusion from public transit, both actions led to legal challenges, both cases had significant consequences for transit desegregation.
But the comparison flattens what is distinctive about each woman’s story and about the historical moments they inhabited.
Rosa Parks’s 1955 act of resistance was a carefully organized, deliberate act of civil disobedience by a trained activist who had been involved in civil rights organizing for years. It was coordinated with the NAACP and was followed by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a year-long organized economic campaign that drew national and international attention and became a central event of the modern civil rights movement. The legal and political framework was national: the eventual Supreme Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle applied to the whole country, not just to one company.
Elizabeth Jennings’s 1854 resistance occurred a century earlier, in a different city, on a different kind of transit (horse-drawn streetcars on iron rails, not motor buses), under different legal conditions, in a political climate a century removed from the organized mass movement of the 1950s. She did not have the infrastructure of the NAACP or the connection to a national movement with the organizational capacity to mount a city-wide boycott. What she had was a community that organized rapidly and effectively around her case, a legal team that could present her claim, and a judge whose instructions were favorable.