Elizabeth Jennings Graham
We have all heard the saying if you forget your history you are destined to repeat it. So what does Claudette Colson, Rosa Parks and Elizabeth Jennings Graham all have in common? All three women protested riding the transportation system in the United States at different times throughout history. We all know about Rosa Parks famous bus boycott, but so little people knew about the fifteen year old-girl Claudette in 1955 or Ms. Jennings-Graham in 1854.
Elizabeth Jennings Graham, a teacher, church organist, and 19th-century civil rights figure who fought for her right to ride on a segregated New York City streetcar in 1854.
"You shall go out or I'll put you out," the conductor said to Graham. "I told him," Graham later wrote, that "I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church." Driving on, the conductor eventually received aid from a police officer and removed her from the streetcar.
Graham’s story sparked an outcry among many, and led not only to Graham winning a lawsuit in her 1855 case against the Third Avenue Railroad Company, but also to Third Avenue Railroad ordering its cars desegregated the next day. After a series of similar incidents, New York's public transit services were fully desegregated in 1865.
In her later years, Graham began and ran the first kindergarten for black children, which operated until her death in 1901.
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