Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [682]
New York’s African-American churches were too poor to support substantial social welfare programs, but their members did take a hand in supporting an establishment, dedicated to the black community, that had been founded by white Quaker women. In 1836 Anna M. Shotwell and her niece May Murray had discovered two little Negro orphans on the steps of an old house. On learning that no existing nurseries accepted blacks and that the almshouse relegated black children to a squalid cellar, the women established a Colored Orphan Asylum, got the Common Council to donate twenty lots on Fifth Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets, and by 1843 had opened an impressive structure there, the first of its kind in the United States.
The Colored Orphan Asylum received support from the city, the state, and private organizations (when the old Manumission Society finally dissolved in 1849, it transferred all its assets to the asylum). The black community too gave aid, via regular collections at Mother Zion, St. Philip’s, and Abyssinian Baptist and an occasional fair by “Colored Friends” of the institution. In addition, James McCune Smith, the city’s leading black doctor, served as its attending physician throughout the era. Smith, born in New York City of free black parents in 1813, had been educated at the African Free School, tutored privately in the classics, and in 1832 had gone to Scotland for a five-year course of study at the University of Glasgow, earning three degrees. On his return, though barred by white doctors from the New York Academy of Medicine, Smith practiced medicine and ran an apothecary shop.
This cadre of black ministers and doctors organized a remarkable number of ad hoc and ongoing organizations. When southern spokesman and Secretary of State John C. Calhoun alluded snidely to the “vice and pauperism of the African race in the north,” a protest meeting designated Dr. Smith to draft a pamphlet that took vigorous and welldocumented exception to Calhoun’s remarks.
When education for black children was neglected by the city, the New York Society for the Promotion of Education Among Colored Children (whose president was Charles B. Ray) won some modest improvements from the Board of Education, though not the dismantling of segregated schools they sought.
Antisegregationist activists made greater headway combating discriminatory practices in public transportation. Black ministers had long protested omnibus and horsecar company policies that forced black passengers to ride outside on the front platform or wait for a vehicle bearing the sign COLORED PEOPLE ALLOWED IN THE CAR—known as a “Jim Crow” car after Daddy Rice’s minstrel character, which had become an allpurpose derogatory label for blacks. Many walked rather than be humiliated, but this option had grown more onerous as the city expanded: the Rev. Wright’s fatal illness was brought on from the exhaustion of walking miles uptown to see prospective donors and then miles back downtown, “under the full muzzle of the July or August sun.”
The first major breakthrough came thanks to the gritty determination of a twentyfour-year-old schoolteacher. On a Sunday afternoon in July of 1854, Miss Elizabeth Jennings, on her way to play the organ at services of the First Colored Congregation Church on Sixth Street near the Bowery, attempted to board a Third Avenue car at Pearl and Chatham. The conductor told her to wait for the colored car, but after an altercation he grudgingly allowed her entrance, though saying: “Remember, if any passenger objects, you shall go out, whether or no, or I’ll put you out.” Jennings’s response—“I am a respectable person, born and brought up in New York, and I was