of this car."
He attempted to drag her out. The woman clung to the window, the conductor called in the driver to help him, and together they dragged and pulled and at last threw her into the street. Badly hurt, she nevertheless jumped back into the car. The driver galloped his horses down the street, passing every one until a policeman was found who pushed the woman out, not, however, until she had taken the number of the car. She then made her way home.
Elizabeth Jennings took the case into court, and it came before the Supreme Court of the State in February, 1855, Chester A. Arthur, afterwards President of the United States, being one of the lawyers for the plaintiff. The judge's charge was clear on the point that common carriers were bound to carry all respectable people, white or colored, and the plaintiff was given $225 damages, to which the court added ten per cent and costs; and to quote the New York Tribune's comment on the case,11 "Railroads, steamboats, omnibuses, and ferryboats will be admonished from this as to the rights of respectable colored people."12
When you talk with the elderly educated colored people of New York today, they tell you that before the War were "dark days." The responsibility felt by the thoughtful Negroes was very great. They had not only their own battles to wage, but there were the fugitives who were entering the city by the Underground Railroad, whom they must assist though it cost them their own liberty. In 1835 a Vigilance Committee was formed in New York City to take charge of all escaping slaves, and also to prevent the arrest and return to slavery of free men of color. Colored men served on this Committee, and its secretary was the minister of the church to which Elizabeth Jennings was endeavoring to make her way that Sunday morning, the Reverend Charles B. Ray. In 1850 the New York State Vigilance Committee was formed with Gerritt Smith as President and Ray as Secretary. Ray's home was frequently used to shelter fugitives.13 Once a young man, stepping up to the door and learning that it was Charles Ray's house, whistled to his companions in the darkness, and fourteen black men made their appearance and received shelter. There would also come the task of negotiating for the purchase of a slave, or this proving impossible, for the careful working out of a means for his escape. Dark days, indeed, but made memorable to the Negro by heroic work and the friendship of great men. Perhaps the two races have never worked together in such fine companionship as at the unlawful and thrilling task of protecting and aiding the fugitive.
The hardest year of the century for the Negro was 1863, when the draft riot imperilled every dark face. Many Negroes fled from the city. Colored homes were fired, the Orphan Asylum for colored children on Fifth Avenue was burned, and even the dead might not be buried save at the peril of undertaker and priest. Elizabeth Jennings, now Mrs. Graham, lost a child when the rioting was at its height. An undertaker named Winterbottom, a white man, was brave enough to give his services, winning the lasting gratitude and patronage of the colored people. With the danger of violence about them, the father and mother went to Greenwood Cemetery, where the Reverend Morgan Dix of Trinity Church read the burial service at the grave.
With the end of the War and the passage of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments came a revulsion of feeling for the race. "I remember," an old time friend of the Negro tells me, "when the fifteenth amendment was passed. The colored people stood in great numbers on the streets, and on their faces was a look of gratitude and thanksgiving that I shall never forget." Following the amendment came the State Civil Rights Bill in 1873, declaring that all persons should be entitled to full and equal accommodations in all public places; and discrimination for a time largely ceased.
While the colored people were winning citizenship, their progress in industry was also considerable. Until 1860 the race was infrequently segregated, and black and white were neighbors, not only in their homes, but in business. Samuel R. Scottron, a careful Negro writer, compiled a long list of the trades in which Negroes engaged before the War. Besides the various lines of domestic service, in which they were more frequently seen than today—coachmen, cooks, waitresses, seamstresses, barbers—there were many craftsmen, ship-builders, trimmers, riggers, coopers, caulkers, printers, tailors, carpenters. "Second-hand clothing shops were everywhere kept by colored men. All the caterers and restaurant keepers of the high order, as well as small places, were kept by colored men. … Varick and Peters kept about the most pretentious barber shop in the city. Patrick Reason was one of the most capable engravers. The greatest among the restaurateurs was Thomas Downing, who kept a restaurant under what is now the Drexel Building, corner of Wall and Broad Streets. The drug stores of Dr. James McCune Smith on West Broadway, and Dr. Philip A. White on Frankfort Street, were not outclassed by any kept by white men in their day."14
And so the list goes on. It is perhaps somewhat exaggerated in the importance in the city's business life which it gives to the colored race. Charles Andrews, in 1837, says of the pupil who graduates from his school, "He leaves with every avenue closed against him—doomed to encounter as much prejudice and contempt as if he were not only destitute of that education which distinguishes the civilized from the savage, but as if he were incapable of receiving it." And he goes on to tell of those few who have been able to learn trades, and their subsequent difficulties in finding employment in good shops. White journeymen object to working in the same shop with them, and many of the best lads go to sea or become waiters, barbers, coachmen, servants, laborers. But he is writing of an early date, and the opinion of the colored people seems to be that, before our large foreign immigration, the Negro was more needed in New York than today and received a large share of satisfactory employment. His chief competitor was the Irish immigrant, like himself an agricultural laborer, without previous training in business, and he was frequently able to hold his own in his shop. His long experience in domestic service, moreover, made him a better caterer than the representatives of any other nationality that had yet entered the city. His churches were flourishing, thus securing a profession for which he had natural ability, and as we have seen, colored men and women taught in the New York schools.
The city grew rapidly after 1875, and the colored society, the little group that had attained to modest means and education, bought homes, chiefly in Brooklyn, where land was easier to secure than in Manhattan, and strove to enlarge the opportunities for those who were to come after them. Color prejudice had waned, and they often met with especial consideration because of their race. Had they been white they would have slipped into the population and been lost, as happened to the Germans and the Irish, who had been their competitors. As it was, they formed a society apart from the rest of the city, meeting it occasionally in work or through the friendship of children, who, left to themselves, know no race. They had battled against prejudice and had won their rights as citizens.
As we look at the life of a segregated people, however, we see that we tend always to regard not the individual but the group. The Negro is a man in Europe, because there he is an individual, standing or falling by his own merits. But in America, even in so cosmopolitan a city as New York, he is judged, not by his own achievements, but by the achievements of every other New York black man. So we will leave these able colored Americans, who won much both for themselves and for their race, and turn to the mass of the Negroes, the toiling poor, who dwell in our tenements today.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Daniel Horsmanden, "New York Conspiracy, or a History of the Negro Plot."
2. James Grant Wilson, "History of New York," Vol. II, p. 314.
|
Population of New York from 1800 to 1900: Total and
|
