James W. C. Pennington’s May 1855 case against the Sixth Avenue line was part of this campaign. Pennington had been one of the organizers around the Jennings incident; he was now a plaintiff in his own right. His case did not go well. The verdict against him demonstrated that the Jennings precedent, while real, was not automatically replicable — the jury in his case reached a different conclusion, and the specific conditions that had produced the Jennings verdict (the Rockwell instruction, the Arthur representation, the accumulated community and press pressure) did not fully replicate in every subsequent case.
The Pennington setback did not end the campaign. The association continued organizing and eventually produced a settlement with the Eighth Avenue line that opened it to Black riders. The Ninth Avenue line followed. The First, Second, and Fourth Avenue companies had opened their cars after the Jennings verdict; with the Eighth and Ninth Avenue lines added over the following years, the campaign was making cumulative progress.
Thomas Jennings died in 1856 before seeing the full results of the association he had built. The organization continued under other leadership, with Pennington, Garnet, and other figures of the Black New York community carrying the work forward. The association is described in some sources as having ceased operations around 1860, by which point the major transit lines had been opened to Black riders.
Whether 1860, 1861, or a somewhat later date marks the practical end of formal streetcar exclusion in New York depends on which lines and which forms of exclusion one is counting. The formal statutory prohibition of transit discrimination came later, with state legislation that sources describe variously as occurring in 1873. The gap between the end of formal company exclusion policies and the passage of state law represents the difference between a campaign that had won its immediate objectives and a legal rule that made those gains statutory rather than contingent on further litigation.