Streetcar to Justice by Amy Hill Hearth

Author:Amy Hill Hearth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

What Happened to Elizabeth Jennings?

ELIZABETH JENNINGS WAS A HERO in the eyes of the black community as well as white supporters of equal rights for blacks, but there were hard times ahead.

In 1859, four years after her victory in court, her beloved father died at the age of sixty-eight. He did not live to see the election of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, or the end of slavery in the United States.

A year after Thomas Jennings died, Elizabeth married a man named Charles Graham, a native of St. Croix, one of three islands that today constitute the U.S. Virgin Islands. Two years after they married, Elizabeth and Charles were blessed with the birth of a baby boy. He was named Thomas after Elizabeth’s father.

But Thomas, when only a year old, became ill and died, an all-too-common fate for infants and children at the time. His death happened, by coincidence, during the Civil War draft riots, when horrible violence rocked Manhattan from July 13 through July 16, 1863. Much of the brutality was aimed at black bystanders. Elizabeth and Charles took a considerable risk when they insisted on escorting Thomas’s body to Brooklyn for burial.

The riots were so vicious that many black residents fled the city as soon as they could. Elizabeth Jennings, her husband, and her mother were among them. They moved to Monmouth County, New Jersey, at the seashore, to live with Elizabeth’s sister Matilda.

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