Charlotte L. Brown (1839–?) was an American educator and civil rights activist who was one of the first to legally challenge racial segregation in the United States when she filed a successful lawsuit against a streetcar company in San Francisco in the 1860s after she was forcibly removed from a segregated streetcar. Brown's legal action and the precedent it created led to additional challenges to segregation in San Francisco and within 30 years, California enacted legislation to make such segregation on streetcars illegal statewide.
Family and early life
Brown was born in Maryland in 1839, the daughter of James E Brown, who was born enslaved, and Charlotte Brown, a free seamstress. The elder Charlotte Brown purchased her husband's freedom and in 1850 they were living as Free people of color in Baltimore, Maryland, with several children, including Charlotte.Elaine Elinson, San Francisco's own Rosa Parks, San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 20121850 Census, Baltimore, Maryland, Ancestry.com Some time between 1850 and 1855 they moved their family to San Francisco, which was booming as a result of the California Gold Rush, and became a part of that city's burgeoning black middle class.1860 Census, San Francisco, California, Ancestry.comThurman, Sue Bailey. Pioneers of Negro Origin in California. San Francisco: Acme Publishing Company, 1949, reprinted 1971, p. 8 The black population of the city at that time was 1,176 people, or about 2 percent.Giesberg, Judith, The Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front, University of Northern Carolina Press, 2009, p. 98 In San Francisco, James E Brown ran a livery stable, was a partner in the black newspaper Mirror of the Times,Egli, Ida Rae, No Rooms of Their Own: Women Writers of Early California, Heyday, 1997, p. 256 an antislavery crusader, and a member of the San Francisco Literary Society, a discussion and debate group for prominent African American men.Daniels, D.H., Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco, University of California Press, 1980, p. 45, 137 In 1855, Charlotte was the teenage bridesmaid at the San Francisco wedding of her sister Margaret, who married the wealthy Black entrepreneur George Washington Dennis.Delilah Beasley, The Negro Trailblazers of California, 1919, p. 120
Streetcar incident
At 8PM on April 17, 1863, Charlotte Brown took a seat on a horse-drawn streetcar one block from her home on Filbert Street in San Francisco. She was on her way to see her doctor. The streetcar was owned by the Omnibus Railroad Company. When the streetcar conductor approached her and asked her to leave, Brown said she "had a right to ride" and had no intention of leaving the car.Giesburg, p. 101
In her courtroom testimony, she stated:
"The conductor went around and collected tickets and when he came to me I handed him my ticket and he refused to take it. It was one of the Omnibus railroad tickets, one that I had purchased of them previous to that time. He replied that colored persons were not allowed to ride. I told him I had been in the habit of riding ever since the cars had been running. I answered that I had a great ways to go and I was later than I ought to be."Giesburg, p. 160
The conductor, Thomas Dennison, asked her several times to leave, and each time she refused. Finally, when a white woman objected to her presence, he grabbed her by the arm and escorted her off the car.Quintard Taylor, Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000, University of Oklahoma Press, 2008, p. 79
Charlotte Brown vs. Omnibus Railroad
Her father James E Brown hired attorney W. C. Burnett, and Charlotte Brown brought a lawsuit against the Omnibus Railroad Company for $200.Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi, Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California, Heyday Press, 2010, Chapter Four: Under Color of Law Quintard Taylor, Shirley Ann Wilson Moore, African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000, University of Oklahoma Press, Aug 1, 2008, p. 77Pacific Appeal, Nov 21, 1863, African Americans had just won the right to testify against whites that same year.Elaine, Elinson, San Francisco's Own Rosa Parks, San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 2012, The Omnibus Railroad argued that its conductor's action was justified because racial segregation protected white women and children who might be fearful or 'repulsed' by riding in the same car as African Americans.Quintard and Moore p. 77 Brown won her case, presided over by Judge Cowles, but the jury only awarded her twenty-five dollars.Pacific Appeal, June 26, 1863, The conductor, Dennison, was convicted in a criminal court of assault and battery against Brown.Giesburg, p. 132
Brown's civil case was tied up in appeals for the next two years. In one retrial, the jury awarded Brown $25 and costs initially, but it was reduced to only five cents, the price of the streetcar ticket.Sacramento Daily Union, November 14, 1863, Meanwhile, just three days after the first trial, Brown was ejected from yet another streetcar and brought a second suit against Omnibus, this time for $3,000.Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, W. W. Norton & Company, 1999, p. 93 Finally, in October 1864, her case was tried in a higher court. In his judgment of October 5, 1864, Judge Orville C. Pratt of the 12th District Court upheld the earlier verdict in favor of Brown, ruling that excluding passengers from streetcars because of their race was illegal. He had no desire, he said in his ruling, to "perpetuate a relic of barbarism":
"It has been already quite too long tolerated by the dominant race to see with indifference the negro or mulatto treated as a brute, insulted, wronged, enslaved, made to wear a yoke, to tremble before white men, to serve him as a tool, to hold property and life at his will, to surrender to him his intellect and conscience, and to seal his lips and belie his thought through dread of the white man's power", Judge Pratt stated.lElaine Elinson and Stan Yogi, Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California, Chapter Four, Heyday Press, 2010, Chapter Four
In January 1865, a jury awarded Brown $500.Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, p. 93 The Omnibus Railroad Company appealed the verdict but was refused another trial.
Public reaction
After the first trial, the black-owned newspaper the Pacific Appeal noted that the verdict in her favor "establishes the right, by law, of colored persons to ride in such conveyances".
"While the law recognizes and gives us the right to ride in such conveyances," the editorial continued, "there are a certain number of the employees of this Company, who, if a colored person attempts to cross the street while their car is passing, are seized with a sudden fit of Negrophobia, which is generally manifested by pulling their alarm bell violently, as if some danger was imminent, so afraid are they that some other of our respectable females might attempt to exercise the right that Miss Brown has just won. So long as we have law, justice and right on our side, we want no pity."Pacific Appeal, Number 34, November 1863
Judge Pratt's 1864 ruling was derided in an editorial cartoon by a local white-owned newspaper that showed blacks and whites riding side by side. Using a racial epithet, it accused Pratt of being partial to African Americans, and questioned whether the light-skinned Brown was really black, or just filing suit for the monetary award.Taylor and Moore, African-American Women Confront the West, p. 88 A white editor of The Sacramento Daily Union, on the other hand, said of Pratt's decision, "his argument is lucid, and his decision, we believe, chimes in with the sentiment of the people".Sacramento Daily Union, Volume 28, Number 4225, 5 October 1864
The Charlotte Brown case paved the way for other cases brought by San Francisco African Americans like William Bowen and Mary Ellen Pleasant that challenged the "whites-only" practices of the privately owned streetcars.Elinson, Elaine, "San Francisco's Own Rosa Parks" San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 2012Hudson, Lynn Marie, The Making of "Mammy Pleasant": A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-century, University of Illinois Press, p. 51 In 1893 streetcar segregation was officially outlawed on statewide streetcars by the California legislature.Giesburg, p 34Degraaf and Taylor, Seeking El Dorado, African Americans in California, University of Washington Press, 2001, p. 109
After Charlotte Brown won her case, Senator Charles Sumner invoked the case in Congress as setting an important precedent for racial equality when he argued in favor of integrating streetcars in the nation's capital.Journal of the Civil War Era: Winter 2011 Issue, p 544
Later life
In 1867, Charlotte Brown opened a school for young children at 10 Scotland Street in San Francisco, offering "all the branches of primary education" as well as music and embroidery.Pacific Appeal, Elevator, Number 14, 5 July 1867 In 1874, she married James Henry Riker,The Elevator, January 27, 1874 another prominent African American activist of San Francisco, who had worked as a live-in personal servant to William Chapman Ralston and was employed as a steward at the Palace Hotel during their marriage.Los Angeles Herald, Vol 11, Number 128, 30 April 1879Elevator, No. 15, 14 July 1865Elevator, Number 52, 4 April 18741870 Census, San Francisco, Ancestry.comCalifornia Voter Registration Lists 1870 and 1880, Ancestry.com. Riker, along with Brown's father, was one of the organizers of the 1865 California State Convention of Colored Citizens.The Elevator, June 16, 1865 The society pages of the black newspaper The Elevator printed an announcement in 1877 of a surprise party for a fellow steward at the Palace Hotel that was given by Charlotte and James H Riker in their residence on 1018 Powell Street in San Francisco.Elevator, Number 52, 31 March 1877
After the death of her husband James in 1885 Charlotte L Riker left San Francisco and worked as a matron at University Hall at Wilberforce University in Ohio. By 1900, Mrs Riker was staying at the home of William Still in Philadelphia, where she had "a host of friends." In 1901 she assumed the matronship of the Philadelphia Home for the Aged and Infirm Colored Persons,The Philadelphia Times (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) · Fri, Jun 12, 1891 and in 1903, as head matron of a children's school for The Woman's League of Washington DC, she was described as "a woman of culture and broad experience."
Charlotte L Brown Riker died in Norristown, Pennsylvania, on February 24, 1914.https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/5164/records/1662398?tid=205307657&pid=272681935796&ssrc=pt
Historical context
The Charlotte Brown lawsuit was one of the first of several actions that were brought by black activists in both Southern and Northern cities throughout the United States to protest exclusion and segregation on public transportation in the 19th and 20th centuries.Blair L. M. Kelley. Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson. John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. In 1854, Elizabeth Jennings successfully filed suit against the Third Avenue Railway Company in New York City after she had been ejected from a streetcar there because of her skin color.Greider, Katharine, ''The Schoolteacher and the Streetcar, The New York Times, Nov 13, 2005 In Philadelphia in 1865, a "Mrs. Derry" won a civil suit and $50 in damages after a streetcar conductor threw her off the bus and kicked her when she and a group of women were returning from tending to Civil War soldiers.Giesburg, p. 137