## The Geography of Exclusion: How the Lines Divided the City
New York’s street railway companies did not all operate the same exclusionary policy, and the variation among them shaped the campaign that followed the Jennings verdict.
The Third Avenue Railroad Company, which had excluded Elizabeth Jennings and then desegregated immediately after the verdict, ran along Third Avenue on the east side of Manhattan. The First, Second, and Fourth Avenue companies, which opened their cars to Black riders in the period following the verdict, served adjacent corridors. The Sixth Avenue line, which Pennington attempted to challenge in May 1855 and lost, served the west side. The Eighth Avenue line required sustained campaign pressure before settling; the Ninth Avenue followed.
This geographic patchwork meant that a Black New Yorker’s experience of the transit system depended partly on which avenues their routes required. A person whose commute took them along Third Avenue might, after February 1855, travel without exclusion. A person whose commute required the Sixth Avenue line faced continued exclusion until that line was opened. The campaign the Legal Rights Association conducted was not only a legal campaign but a geographic one — mapping the exclusionary terrain of the city and targeting each line in turn.
The concentration of different communities in different neighborhoods of the city made this geography more than abstract. The neighborhoods where Black New Yorkers were concentrated in the 1850s and 1860s were on the west side of Manhattan, in the area that would later be called the Tenderloin and eventually Harlem. The avenues that served those neighborhoods — Sixth, Eighth, Ninth — were among the lines most resistant to desegregation. The geography of exclusion was not accidental; it was structured to be most burdensome to the community most likely to rely on those specific lines.