This was not accidental. Thomas Jennings had spent decades operating in networks that connected Black civil society to sympathetic white allies and journalists. He understood how to use the press, and the press campaign around his daughter’s case was a deliberate strategic choice rather than a reactive response to media interest.
## Sarah Adams
Elizabeth Jennings was not alone when she boarded the Third Avenue Railroad car on July 16, 1854. Her companion, Sarah Adams, was with her, also headed to the First Colored Congregational Church.
Sarah Adams is a figure whose role in the incident is noted in accounts of the case but whose subsequent story is not well-documented in the sources that survive. She was present for the confrontation with the conductor, for the physical removal, for the involvement of the police officer. She was a witness to everything that happened.
The Historical Society of New York Courts case page names Sarah Adams specifically. Her presence is not incidental: she was a companion, a witness, and a person who shared the experience of being treated as someone who did not belong in the car that Sunday morning.
The sources do not indicate whether Adams was also removed from the car or whether the conductor’s attention focused primarily on Elizabeth Jennings. The legal case was Elizabeth’s case, brought in her name. Adams does not appear as a plaintiff or as a prominently named witness in the surviving accounts.
Her presence is worth acknowledging because the incident was not a solitary act of individual resistance. It happened between two women going to church together, caught in a confrontation with a conductor who decided one of them should not be in the car. The fact that Elizabeth Jennings chose to resist, and to allow her family to pursue legal action, reflects something about her specifically — her preparation, her connections, her family’s organizational capacity. But Sarah Adams was there too.