Streetcar Justice: The Struggle for Racial Inclusion on San Francisco Streetcars, 1863−68

In this paper, I analyze the lawsuits by Charlotte Brown and Mary Ellen Pleasant against two San Francisco streetcar companies during the 1860s. Brown and Pleasant were excluded from riding streetcars, and their lawsuits demonstrate the complex and shifting racial hierarchies that dictated urban life in 1860s San Francisco. Pleasant and Brown—leaders of San Francisco’s Black community—claimed the right to ride on streetcars by using the language of the common carrier. As common carriers, streetcar corporations were supposed to be accessible to anyone who paid for a ticket. While their lawsuits succeeded in expanding transit access for Black San Franciscans, this fight was conditioned by racial hierarchies inside and surrounding the streetcar. Legal claims for inclusion by Black people coincided with virulent anti-Chinese antagonism and violence. San Francisco’s diverse racial politics show how struggles for citizenship by Black people were read and interpreted by white political officials alongside their strong anti-Chinese bias in everything from neighborhood segregation to employment. For Brown and Pleasant, the right to ride a streetcar was a marker of their humanity, their citizenship, and their belonging in a modern American city. Just as the streetcars were continually in motion, moving up one hill and down another, African American women’s struggle for transit justice in San Francisco showed shifting political and technological currents. Brown’s and Pleasant’s lawsuits called for a basic right to ride, but they dovetailed with a much broader and national struggle for citizenship, freedom, and racial justice. This was a struggle which played out in courthouses, at Colored Conventions, and on the streets and streetcars of San Francisco.