The First Freedom Riders: Streetcars and Street Fights in Jim Crow New York

FAIN: FT-278719-21

Richard J. Bell
University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)

Research for a book on the desegregation of mass transit in New York City before and during the Civil War.

I seek the NEH Summer Stipend to conduct 2 months of archival research for a new book project. The First Freedom Riders is the story of Elizabeth Jennings, the 25-year-old New Yorker who launched the first successful civil disobedience campaign in U.S. history. On Sunday, July 16, 1854, Jennings stepped onto a ‘whites-only’ streetcar on Third Avenue becoming the first among a small army of young black women and men to fight to forcibly desegregate mass transit in New York City. The First Freedom Riders argues that their campaign to stage a civil war in miniature was unprecedented, radical, and highly coordinated. To disrupt and destroy Jim Crow in Gotham City, black activists built a new organization, the Legal Rights Association, that pioneered the art and science of protesting in public and developed strategies of civil disobedience—public set-pieces, boycotts, petitions, defense funds, etc.—that have become the hallmarks of grassroots anti-racism protests ever since.