page_title: Charlotte L. Brown
section_title: Historical context
hierarchical_section_title: Charlotte L. Brown / Historical context
caption_attribution_description: English: Statue of Rosa Parks from Memphis Museum
context_page_description: Charlotte L. Brown 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 lawsuit against a streetcar company in San Francisco in the 1860s after she was forcibly removed from a segregated streetcar.
context_section_description: 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. 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. 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.Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Frances Watkins Parker also lobbied actively for streetcar integration after being refused ridership on streetcars in Washington, D.C., Memphis, and Pennsylvania.
  Though streetcars in the north were largely de-segregated by the end of the 19th century, segregation on public transportation became the official policy in many cities of the South. In the 20th century, women like Irene Morgan and Mary Louise Smith continued to battle segregation on public transportation. In 1954, Rosa Parks challenged the practice in Montgomery, Alabama, launching a citywide bus boycott and helping to start the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s.
  In African American Women Confront the West, scholars Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore analyze the Charlotte Brown case and other 19th-century streetcar desegregation lawsuits brought by black women as they relate historically to both race and gender. They noted that it was frequently women who filed these lawsuits because of prevailing ideas of public vs. private space, and white views of black gender roles:
  "Activist black men were keenly aware of the power of black women to go, where they, as men, could not," they write. "Relying on the wedge of gender, black women's lawsuits against streetcar companies ultimately assured the right to travel of blacks generally ... the declaration of law was a general one that applied not simply to Charlotte Brown or to Mary Pleasant, but to all blacks as well."
caption: Image of Rosa Parks from Memphis Civil Rights Museum
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