She attended fundraisers for community causes. She maintained correspondence with Frederick Douglass, with William Nell (a Black abolitionist and historian who was among the first Black officers of the American Anti-Slavery Society), and with Timothy Thomas Fortune. Fortune was one of the most important Black journalists of the late nineteenth century, the founder of the New York Age, and an early articulator of what would become the platform for Black civil rights in the generation before W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP.
The correspondence network that Elizabeth Jennings Graham participated in was the communication infrastructure of the Black civil rights movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Letters were how activists shared information, coordinated strategies, and maintained the connections that made collective action possible across distance.
She also served as guardian to Edward Wright, who lived in her household and whom she helped raise. Wright went on to become an attorney. His clients included Jack Johnson, the Black heavyweight boxing champion who faced sustained legal persecution from the federal government, and Ida B. Wells, the journalist and anti-lynching activist who was among the most important civil rights figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The through-line from Elizabeth Jennings’s household to the civil rights legal work that Edward Wright would do is not a straight line of direct instruction; it is the more diffuse transmission of values, connections, and orientation that happens in families and households over years. Wright grew up in a household run by a woman who had gone to court for her rights, who maintained connections across the Black civil rights network, and who was operating a kindergarten for Black children from her own home. The commitments and connections of that household were part of what he carried into his legal career.