Review: 'Streetcar to Justice' by Amy Hill Hearth

During Black History Month, many students learn about Rosa Parks, the civil rights activist who in 1955 refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., to a white passenger — and rode into history.

A century before that, another black woman made a stand against segregation on a New York City streetcar and was thrown into the street for her trouble — twice — but ultimately won in court.

Elizabeth Jennings has been largely forgotten, but Amy Hill Hearth's book for young readers, "Streetcar to Justice," brings the story back.

Hearth has written about black history and civil rights activists before. Her 1993 book, "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years," was based on interviews with the remarkable sisters Sadie and Bessie Delany, daughters of a former slave, who became groundbreaking career women. The book was a bestseller that was adapted into a hit Broadway play and a television movie.

In "Streetcar to Justice," Hearth reaches further into history, to an event that occurred on July 16, 1854. Elizabeth Jennings, a schoolteacher in her early 20s, was on her way from her home in Lower Manhattan to choir practice at the First Colored American Congregational Church, where she was the organist.

New York City's system of horse-drawn streetcars was segregated, with a few cars marked for black riders. The others were for whites, although "respectable" black people were allowed to ride them if other passengers and the car conductors did not object.

Jennings, worried she would be late, flagged down a whites-only streetcar. She and a friend, Sarah Adams, boarded the car and appealed to the conductor.

The conductor "took hold of me and I took hold of the window sash and held on. He pulled me until he broke my grasp and I took hold of his coat and held onto that."

The conductor summoned the car's driver for help. "They then both seized hold of me by the arms and pulled and dragged me flat down on the bottom of the platform. … I screamed murder with all my voice."

They flung Jennings into the street — and she got up and reboarded the streetcar. The conductor drove until he found a policeman, who threw ­Jennings into the street a second time, leaving her with cuts, bruises and broken bones.

Elizabeth's father, Thomas Jennings, was a tailor, businessman and activist for the rights of black people; he may have been the first black person to receive a U.S. patent, for a dry cleaning method. Her maternal grandfather, Jacob Cartwright, was a soldier in the Revolutionary War.

After calling a doctor, Thomas Jennings went to his friends — among them the former slave and great abolitionist Frederick Douglass — to spread his daughter's story. Newspapers covered it widely, and soon Jennings had an attorney, one who would later make his own historic mark as the 21st president of the United States.

Hearth writes: "Winning a criminal case would punish a small number of people, the men who assaulted Elizabeth. Winning a civil case, however, could improve the lives of all black New Yorkers, in the present and in the future." And that it did. Even though the judge, lawyers and jury were all white men, Jennings won.

Hearth's book expertly gives young readers wider context for Jennings' story. She paints a picture of a much smaller New York, and notes in one of the book's numerous sidebars that slavery was practiced in the North as well as the South; New York had its own slave market until 1762, and slave labor was used to build the wall for which Wall Street is named and the original street that's now Broadway.

A few years after the court case, Jennings married Charles Graham; their only son died in infancy, and Graham died seven years after the marriage. In 1895, Elizabeth opened the first free kindergarten for black children in New York, in her home on W. 41st Street. She died at home in 1901, at age 74.

Colette Bancroft is the books editor of the Tampa Bay Times. Twitter: @colettemb