A Century Before Rosa Parks, She Fought Segregated Transit in SF

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.”

While Charlotte ultimately won the case and was awarded $25 and costs, appeals by Omnibus kept her tied up in court for months. The end result saw her award sum reduced to just five cents, the cost of Charlotte’s original ticket. What’s more, the case did not change Omnibus policy. Just days after the first case was finally over, Charlotte was removed from another Omnibus streetcar.

Charlotte and her father went straight back to court, this time finding themselves arguing in front of a sympathetic judge. Judge Orville C. Pratt of the 12th District Court deemed segregation barbaric and, in his landmark 1864 ruling, stated:

It has been already quite too long tolerated by the dominant race to see with indifference the Negro or mulatto treated as a brute, insulted, wronged, enslaved, made to wear a yoke, to tremble before white men, to serve him as a tool, to hold property and life at his will, to surrender to him his intellect and conscience, and to seal his lips and belie his thought through dread of the white man’s power.

Charlotte was awarded $500.

Charlotte continued to follow in the footsteps of her fierce family later in life. A decade after winning her court case, Charlotte married fellow activist James Henry Riker, who was one of the organizers of the 1865 California State Convention of Colored Citizens, which brought together Black activists, churches, social clubs and literary societies to plan courses of action. The couple stayed in San Francisco with Charlotte establishing a primary school in North Beach.

It’s possible that Charlotte’s case bolstered Mary Ellen Pleasant in 1866 when she, more famously, brought a lawsuit against North Beach and Mission Railroad Company for refusing to pick her up, an ongoing problem for San Francisco’s Black population for years after Brown’s case concluded. Pleasant’s lawsuit made it all the way to California’s Supreme Court, and in 1893, a statewide ban on streetcar segregation finally came into effect.

For stories on other Rebel Girls from Bay Area History, click here.