Fourth: the community was the infrastructure. Chester Arthur was a talented attorney, and his later fame has sometimes made the Jennings case a footnote in accounts of his career. The reality is the reverse: Arthur was one member of an infrastructure that the Black community of New York had been building for decades. Thomas Jennings’s civic networks, the church’s organizational capacity, Pennington and Garnet’s leadership, Frederick Douglass’s press platform — these were what made the legal action possible and meaningful. The attorney presents the case; the community makes the case possible.
Elizabeth Jennings was twenty-seven years old when she boarded the Third Avenue Railroad car on July 16, 1854. She was on her way to play the organ at church. She was running late. She was told to get off and wait for a different car. She refused. She called the conductor a good-for-nothing impudent fellow, held onto the window frame, and screamed for help.
Then she went home and wrote a letter.
The letter became a newspaper story. The newspaper story became a lawsuit. The lawsuit became a verdict. The verdict became a campaign. The campaign became, over nineteen years, a statutory right.
She died in 1901 at the age of seventy-four, buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery with her husband and son, having spent the last two decades of her life educating young Black children from her home on West 41st Street.
A block of Park Row bears her name. A school in Brooklyn bears her name. The record she created, and the history she made, continues to be recovered.