Two years before slavery was officially abolished by the 13th Amendment, and a full 92 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, Charlotte L. Brown took on San Francisco’s racially segregated Omnibus Railroad and Cable Company and changed the city’s public transportation laws forever.
On April 17, 1863, seven months before President Lincoln had even given the Gettysburg Address, Charlotte boarded a horse-drawn streetcar, a relatively new form of transport. When the conductor reached her, he refused to take the ticket she had bought and asked her to leave, saying that “colored persons” — two percent of San Francisco’s population at the time — were not allowed to ride. Charlotte, in her early-20s at the time, had successfully circumvented streetcar segregation laws many times before, sometimes by wearing a veil. She refused to move. When a white woman joined the conductor in demanding she go, Charlotte was physically removed.
Charlotte was not one to go quietly however, thanks in large part to the way her tenacious parents had raised her. Her father, James E. Brown, made a living running his own stable, but in his personal life, James was a co-founder of the Bay Area’s first African-American newspaper, Mirror of the Times, and was an outspoken abolitionist rumored to protect fugitive slaves. James had once been a slave himself, released from servitude only when his wife, a seamstress whom Charlotte was named after, had raised enough money to buy his freedom — no easy feat.
Charlotte and her family had moved to San Francisco from Maryland at some point during the 1850s, shortly after slavery was abolished in California. By the time she was forced from that streetcar, the Brown family was living in North Beach and were prominent figures in the local Black community.
Charlotte and her father decided to take action by bringing a lawsuit against Omnibus Railroad, an extraordinarily brave move, given that it had only been a matter of months since African Americans in California had gained the right to testify against white people in court. Still, during her affidavit, Charlotte spoke plainly:
I lived one block from where I took the car. When the conductor first came to me and refused to take my ticket, I told him I thought I had a right to ride, it was a public conveyance. I told him I had a long distance to go … I told him I would not get out … He took hold of my arm. I made no resistance. I knew it was of no use to resist and therefore I went out, and he kept hold of me until I was out of the car, holding on to me until I struck the walk.
During the case, Omnibus defended its racist policies, arguing that people of color should not be permitted to ride streetcars in case they made white women and children feel “fearful or repulsed.”
