Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [683]
The young woman reported this to her church and to her father, Thomas Jennings, a successful tailor with a long record of activism in the black community. Born in New York in 1798, Jennings had dug trenches to help protect the city during the 1812 war, worked in the African Society for Mutual Relief, and helped found the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Now the Jenningses sued the Third Avenue line and were represented by attorneys from the firm of Culver, Parker, and Arthur, including Chester A. Arthur, a twenty-four-year-old recent law school graduate and future president of the United States. When the case came to trial in February 1855, the judge instructed the jury that the company was a common carrier and bound to carry all respectable persons, including “colored persons, if sober, well-behaved, and free from disease.” The jury awarded Jennings $225. After this, most Manhattan railroads ceased discrimination.
Most, but not all. When Shiloh’s Rev. Pennington, encouraged by Jennings’s victory, set about tesdng other lines, he was forcibly expelled from a Sixth Avenue car. Three weeks later blacks organized the Legal Rights Association—with Thomas Jennings as president—to raise funds for Pennington’s (and similar) cases. When this suit reached Superior Court in December 1856, however, the judge decided for the company, saying it had every right to decide who rode its cars. The decision encouraged the Eighth Avenue Railroad to hold fast to segregation until 1856, when Peter S. Porter, treasurer of the Legal Rights Association, after being beaten, kicked, and banged about “most ferociously,” brought suit and won an out-of-court settlement allowing blacks to ride on the same terms as whites.
The African-American community’s most ardent struggle, however, was (as it long had been) against slavery itself. Blacks were active in the American and Foreign Anti Slavery Society. In addition, numbers attended mass abolitionist meetings like those held in Morris Grove, Brooklyn; supported the nationalist Weekly Anglo-African, founded in 1859 by two black printers in the city; worked in the Liberty Party; and helped raise funds for the defense and repatriation of the Mendi Africans who had seized their slave ship, La Amistad, and secured their freedom.
Their riskiest enterprise was harboring runaway slaves and helping them on their way to Canada. The New York Vigilance Committee was still going strong—presided over by Wright, then Ray—with funds gathered by Garnet and Pennington on speaking tours in the British Isles and at annual fairs black women held at the Broadway Tabernacle. New York became a major way station on the Underground Railroad; Ray dealt with over four hundred runaways in one fifteen-month period during 1848-49. City blacks provided sanctuary, food, and clothing—in private homes, in the Mutual Relief Hall (said to have a secret room the length of the building), in the boardinghouse on Dover Street run by passionate abolitionist William P. Powell for “the better class of colored seamen,” and in the churches of Manhattan and Brooklyn: notably Mother Zion, Siloam Presbyterian, Bridge Street Methodist, and Concord Baptist.
After 1850, when President Fillmore signed the Fugitive Slave Law, their work became considerably more dangerous. As the act applied ex post facto to former runaways, many escapees who had remained in New York now fled town—the number of blacks in the city dropped from 13,815 in 1850 to 11,840 in 1855—or went to ground. In 1850 James Hamlet, a thirty-year-old fugitive, had been working for the past three years as a porter for the merchant firm of Tilton and Maloney. Seized