## The Draft Riots and the Fragility of Rights
The New York Draft Riots of July 1863 are one of the most significant events in the history of antebellum New York, and they are directly relevant to the story of streetcar desegregation because they illustrate how thoroughly violence could override legal rights.
The riots began on July 13, 1863, sparked by opposition to the first federal military draft lottery. White working-class men, many of them Irish immigrants, turned their opposition to the draft into a campaign of anti-Black violence that lasted four days and left scores dead and hundreds injured. The Colored Orphan Asylum at Fifth Avenue and Forty-Fourth Street was burned. Black neighborhoods were attacked. Black-owned businesses were destroyed. Black New Yorkers were assaulted on the streets.
During the riots, Black New Yorkers were effectively unable to use public transit. The threat of violence from the mobs who controlled the streets made the formal right to ride a streetcar a moot question. A company that had desegregated its policies could not protect a Black passenger from a mob that attacked the car.
This was the context in which Elizabeth Jennings Graham’s son, Thomas J. Graham, died on July 16, 1863 — exactly nine years after the streetcar incident. He was one year old. The cause recorded was convulsions. Whether the stress of the riots contributed to his death is not something the historical record can establish. What the record does establish is that the family buried a one-year-old child in the middle of the worst anti-Black violence New York City had seen in decades, with the help of a sympathetic white undertaker, and with a funeral service read by a white minister from Trinity Church.