April 17, 1863 – African American Charlotte Brown Challenged Racial Segregation After Being Forced Off Streetcar

Charlotte Brown was born in Maryland in 1839 to parents living as free people of color in Baltimore. After 1850 her family moved to San Francisco and became part of the Black middle class. Charlotte’s father, James E. Brown, ran a livery stable, was a partner in a Black newspaper and was an antislavery crusader. As the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out, “San Francisco had the largest black population in the state. Yet African Americans in the city were prohibited from using the public library and were forced to attend segregated schools.”

On April 17, 1863 – this day in history – Charlotte took a seat on a horse-drawn streetcar, owned by the Omnibus Railroad Company, to visit her doctor. The streetcar conductor asked her to leave and she responded she had a right to ride and did not intend to leave.

Horse-drawn streetcar, San Francisco, 1860s, via Wikipedia

The conductor asked her several times to get off the streetcar, and each time she refused. Finally, when a white woman objected to her presence, the conductor grabbed her by the arm and escorted her off the car.

Her father hired attorney W. C. Burnett, and Charlotte Brown brought a lawsuit against the Omnibus Railroad Company for $200. Just that year, a law had been passed in the legislature allowing Blacks to testify in cases involving whites.

The Omnibus Railroad argued that its conductor’s action was justified because racial segregation protected white women and children who might be fearful or ‘repulsed’ by riding in the same car as African Americans. Brown won her case, but the judge only ordered her reimbursed 5 cents – the streetcar fare.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that within days of the judgment, another conductor forced Brown and her father from a streetcar, and Charlotte brought another lawsuit. In October 1864, Judge Orville Pratt of the 12th District Court ruled that San Francisco streetcar segregation was illegal. In his opinion he 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.”

The jury awarded Brown $500.

Judge Orville C. Pratt

Nevertheless, streetcar drivers continued to refuse to stop for Blacks in the city, or forced them off if they boarded. The Chronicle writes:

It took several more lawsuits, including the one by Mary Ellen Pleasant, the fugitive slave who became known as the mother of civil rights in California, before the state Supreme Court ruled in 1868 that the streetcar company’s exclusion based on race was unlawful.”

In 1867, Charlotte Brown opened a school for young children in San Francisco, offering “all the branches of primary education” as well as music and embroidery. She married Henry Riker, a prominent African American activist in 1874. Little is known about Charlotte Brown Riker’s life after that time, not even the year she died.