Thomas Jennings was also a leading figure in New York’s Black civic life. He co-founded the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, delivered a well-known oration on emancipation in 1827, and was deeply embedded in the abolitionist networks that connected Black New Yorkers with allies across the country. His household was not a household that accepted the terms the broader society tried to impose on it. It was a household that organized against those terms.
Elizabeth’s mother, Elizabeth Cartwright Jennings, was herself a founder of the Ladies Literary Society of New York, established in 1834, one of the early organizations through which Black women in the city pursued education, intellectual engagement, and mutual support. The society raised funds for causes including the assistance of escaped enslaved people.
Into this household Elizabeth Jennings was born and raised. By 1854 she was a schoolteacher — she taught at the African Free School and later at Colored School No. 5 on Thomas Street — and a church organist at the First Colored Congregational Church. She was educated, professionally established, and embedded in a community of people who had spent decades building the institutions of Black New York.
She was also the daughter of a man who understood how to use legal and organizational tools to fight for rights. That fact would matter enormously in the months that followed.
## The Morning of July 16
Elizabeth Jennings and her friend Sarah Adams were running late that Sunday morning. They needed to get to the church on Sixth Street for services, where Elizabeth was expected to play the organ. They boarded what appears to have been the first Third Avenue Railroad car that came along, on Chatham Street near Pearl.