I wrote this for Street Prophets in February, 2010 to mark Black History Month. It is reproduced here with only minor formatting changes. ~SLK
A woman of color encounters — and fights — discrimination in public transportation. Her precedent-setting efforts lead to future civil rights legislation. Think you know her name?
It wasn't Rosa Parks.
No, the woman in question lived a full century before Rosa Parks. Her name was Mary Ellen Pleasant, and this is her story.
Born into slavery in the early part of the 19th century, Mary Ellen claimed to be the daughter of a voodoo priestess and the granddaughter of Governor James Pleasants of Virginia. This may well have been true, but like so much else about her life there are as many legends as facts.
We do know that she was deeply involved in the Underground Railroad throughout the eastern United States and Canada; befriended — and financially supported — John Brown; then made her way to California in the early years of the Gold Rush. Once in San Francisco, she began a number of business enterprises, made friends and alliances with many wealthy and powerful men, and eventually amassed a huge fortune (estimated at $30,000,000). It was during these early years that she "came out" as a woman of color (she had been passing as white in society at large, though not within the black community itself). She never stopped fighting for racial equality.
Pleasant successfully attacked racial discrimination in San Francisco public conveyances when she and two other black women were ejected from a city streetcar in 1866. Her lawsuit, Pleasant v. North Beach & Mission Railroad Company, outlawed segregation in the city's public conveyances. Her efforts earned her the title "mother of the Civil Rights Movement" in California. Her lawsuit set a precedent in the California Supreme Court and was used in future civil rights cases, such as an 1893 case over segregation in housing.
-Wikipedia, Mary Ellen Pleasant
Her later years were made unhappy by enmity, scandal and racial prejudice whipped up by the press (who repeatedly characterized her in headlines as "the Voodoo Queen," "Angel or Arch-fiend?," and, perhaps most insultingly, "Mammy Pleasant," which she (rightly) hated.
She died in 1904, unhappy and in poverty. Her San Francisco mansion (pictured below) gained notoriety for several years as a haunted house; it was destroyed in the first decades of the 20th century. (She also owned a ranch in the wine country of Sonoma County; today, her house there is a bed-and-breakfast.)
On her tombstone (in Napa, California) is the inscription
M.E.P. She was a friend of John Brown.
Mary Ellen Pleasant's residence on Bush Street (since demolished).
Another view of her mansion.
Six of the eucalyptus trees planted by Mary Ellen Pleasant in front of her home remain (they can be seen in the photo above), and in 1975 the City of San Francisco designated them as Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park. A plaque was inserted in the sidewalk:
MOTHER OF CIVIL RIGHTS IN CALIFORNIA
SHE SUPPORTED THE WESTERN TERMINUS OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY FOR FUGITIVE SLAVES
THIS LEGENDARY PIONEER ONCE LIVED ON THIS SITE AND PLANTED THESE SIX TREES