June 25, 2018 • 29 mins
Today’s topic is a person who is sometimes called a 19th-century Rosa Parks. When Elizabeth boarded a horse-drawn streetcar in Manhattan in 1854, a chain of events began which became an important moment in the civil rights of New York's black citizens.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, before we get started, we just wanted to let
you know we have so many upcoming live shows to
talk to you about. Yes, on July seven, I will
be at History Camp Boston. That's me Tracy, only Holly
won't be at that one. I will be in the
History Podcaster panel. And then the next day, July, we
will both be doing a live show at Adams National
(00:20):
Historical Park in Quincy, Massachusetts. It's an outdoor show. It
will happen rainer shine, and since parking is limited at
the park, people are encouraged to take public transportation. That
is probably how I will be getting there. Also in July,
we will be back at Convention Days at Women's Rights
National Historic Park in Seneca Falls, New York. Convention Days
is running from July twenty, and our show is going
(00:43):
to be on Saturday July. And then we have big, big,
big news that we are both very excited about. We
are going on an actual multi city tour. We're going
to hit the East coast in August or we will
be coming to Atlanta, Georgia, Riley, North Carolina, Somerville, Massachusetts, Brooklyn,
New York, and washing To d C. And then in
October my favorite spooky time of year. We will be
(01:04):
coming to the West coast with stops in Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon,
and Los Angeles and San Francisco, California. You can find
more information about all these shows at our website, which
is missed in History dot Com. Click on the link
in the menu that says live shows. Welcome to stuff
you missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(01:32):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and today's topic. H is a person
who is sometimes called the nineteenth century Rosa Parks. The
comparison is somewhat apt because you'll see as her story unfold.
But while Elizabeth Jennings Graham was raised by parents who
were active in advocating for better quality of life and
(01:53):
for people of color, her involvement and how this thing
played out one was a little bit accidental. Uh So
it wasn't something that was part of a bigger civil
rights movement necessarily. Uh it just kind of happened. The
other thing that's interesting, and that makes them very different,
is that while the story of Rosa Parks and the
(02:15):
Montgomery bus boycott and the part she played in it
became very much a part of history that remains talked about.
For a long time, Elizabeth Jennings Graham kind of fell
off the radar and people lost the thread of her
part of history and her uh work for improvement of
the quality of life of black people in nineteenth century
(02:36):
New York. Yeah, it's way earlier than the Montgomery bus
boycott and also not in the South. Yeah, it is
a hundred years earlier. It's like, um, so the Montgomery
bus boycott happened in this incident, initial incident that that
catalyzed this whole thing started in eighteen fifty four. Parts
(02:57):
of it continued into eighteen fifty five, so almost exactly
a hundred years fascinating story, and again it kind of
got lost for a while, but some historians have really
picked up the the flag and kind of done some
research and really investigated who this person was. And there's
also a fun little tag at the end of this
about how kids are starting to learn more and more
(03:18):
about her story. So, the date of Elizabeth Jennings Graham's
birth is completely unknown. We don't have any idea what
the month or the date of her birth was. Her
death certificate at lists eighteen twenty six is the year
of her birth, but a census that was conducted in
eighteen fifty lists it as eighteen thirty. We'll talk a
(03:40):
little bit later about something that gives a clue about
which of those might be more correct, but we still
don't know what would have caused that discrepancy in the
first place. And Elizabeth's father, Thomas Jennings, was the first
black man to hold a U. S. Patent, which he
was awarded in the early eighteen twenties. He had begun
his professional life in tailoring, and he had invented a
(04:00):
means to clean clothes using solvents. It was an early
version of dry cleaning. I have read in some places
it was called dry scouring, but we don't actually have
the text of the patent. He and Elizabeth's mother, who
was also named Elizabeth, were part of New York's black
middle class. They lived at one sixty seven Church Street
in Lower Manhattan, and they were active in the community,
(04:21):
working on improving the lives of other black citizens. Slavery
had been abolished in New York during Thomas's lifetime, over
the course of a series of laws between seventeen and eight.
These phased out the institution of slavery in New York incrementally,
and he had used his patent money to purchase the
freedom of some of his family members. Yeah, he had
(04:43):
been born free, but not everyone in his family had been.
And Thomas had long been involved in activism against racial injustice.
He attended the first three National Conventions of Free People
of Color, which began in eighteen thirty, and he helped
found the Wilberforce Philanthropic Society helped black citizens improve their lives.
Thomas and his wife Elizabeth had at least four other children.
(05:06):
In addition to their daughter Elizabeth, there were two boys
and two girls we know about named William Thomas Junior, Matilda,
and Lucy. The children all attended school. This is the
time when education wasn't a given for children of any background.
Public schools were established in New York in the early
eighteen hundreds, but there weren't any kind of requirements to
attend school, and a lot of children were working at
(05:29):
jobs at a very early age. The Jennings children were
a lot more educated than many other children in New York,
and from a young age, Elizabeth followed in her family's
ideology of fighting against racial injustice. At the age of ten,
she recited an essay at a gathering of the Ladies
Literary Society of the City of New York entitled on
(05:50):
the Improvement of the Mind, which was later published in
the paper The Colored American. That paper was published in
eighteen thirty seven, So if she was ten at the time,
this supports that eighteen twenty six year of birth a
little bit more than we have anything to support the
eighteen thirty year. Although Elizabeth Jennings was born a free woman,
she was also still a black woman, and she grew
(06:11):
up in a largely de facto segregated New York. Slavery
was not abolished at the at the federal level at
the time of the primary event that we're talking about today,
the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty was still in effect.
That act required that enslaved people who ran away to
non slaved states be captured and returned to their owners.
(06:33):
Aiding someone who escaped enslavement was also illegal. Free black
men and women in states that had abolished slavery feared
that they could be kidnapped and transported to a slave state,
even though they had not been enslaved. Yeah, that was
a very real concern because how they would have no
way to fight that if someone dragged them into a
(06:56):
slave state and sold them, they have no of course
against it. At that point. It was really dangerous time. Yeah,
we've we've talked about it in episodes before and talked
about people even the taking the step of if they
had the means, moving to Canada to get away from
the risk of being sold into slavery. In the United States,
there also were not a lot of job prospects for
(07:16):
a young person of color to aspire to, even in
New York. Ministry and teaching jobs were some of the
few non labor positions that were available to black citizens,
and those positions were finite. They could only minister or
teach other people of color. But the Jennings children really
seemed to do quite well for themselves. William ended up
(07:37):
becoming a businessman. I believe he moved to Boston. Thomas Jr.
Was a dentist. Uh, he moved to New Orleans, I think,
and Matilda was a dressmaker. Elizabeth became a teacher. I
read one thing where in eighteen fifty five she was
one of only thirteen black teachers in New York uh
and after a year of teaching at Colored Public School
(07:57):
Number two, she worked in the system that was a
ablished by the New York Society for the Promotion of
Education among Colored Children, which was a better school system
for her, and she also worked as a church organist.
On July fifty four, Jennings was traveling to the first
Colored American Congregational Church preparing to a company the afternoon
(08:18):
choir practice. As usual, she walked a short distance from
the Jennings home to a street car stop at the
corner of Pearl and Shay them She ran into her
friends Sarah E. Adams as she walked, and the two
of them walked together to the stop. She tried to
board a horse drawn street car, which was run by
the Third Avenue Railway Company. Horse Drawn street cars normally
(08:40):
had two men who were running them. There was the
driver and the conductor, and the street car company had
a policy against allowing black passengers. This was a common
policy on street cars. Often black people who wanted to
take a street car would have to wait for one
with a sign that indicated that people of color were
allowed to board, but those were not as frequent as
(09:01):
cars that only accepted white passengers. The problem of the
transportation system and its treatment of black people was not new,
and a rapidly growing city like New York, street cars
were increasingly relied upon by the city's inhabitants, and activists
had been writing about the poor treatment of black travelers
for more than two decades before this point. And we're
(09:23):
gonna pause a little bit early for our sponsor break here,
because I want to keep the account of what actually
happened once the street car came all together. So we're
gonna jump right back in after we first have this pause.
Elizabeth was a little bit worried about making it to
(09:44):
the church to accompany the choir on time, so she
took a chance. Sometimes a conductor would allow a black
passenger to board if none of the other passengers objected,
And so when Elizabeth explained her predicament to the conductor,
he was not sympathetic. He told her she could just
wait for the next car, and she wrote about this
(10:04):
incident quote he told me that the other car had
my people in it, that it was appropriated for that purpose.
I then told him I had no people. It was
no particular occasion I wished to go to church, as
I had been doing for the last six months, and
I did not wish to be detained. So even though
the conductor had told her to get off the street car,
Elizabeth stayed on. She said she would take the next
(10:25):
one if it was one that would take black passengers,
but she was going to stay on the current one
until I got there. When the second street car came,
it was full, which was another problem that arose from
the scarcity of cars that allowed black passengers, and this
set up a battle of wills. Both Elizabeth and the
conductor of the car she was standing on. We're willing
(10:46):
to stand their ground and wait for the other one
to give in. Eventually, though it was the driver's desire
to get going that led the conductor to yield. Elizabeth
was no shrinking Violet, and even as she was allowed
to boy word, she told the conductor that she didn't
know where he was born, but that she was a
New Yorker and that she had never been treated so
poorly while attempting to go to church, and that he
(11:09):
was an impudent fellow. The conductor answered that he was
from Ireland. When she replied that she didn't care where
he was from she only cared that quote. He behaved
himself and did not insult genteel persons. To set the
conductor off, he physically removed Elizabeth's friend Sarah, and then
dragged Elizabeth herself out. She attempted to resist by holding
(11:32):
onto the window sash, and after a bit of a struggle,
the conductor told the driver to come out and help him.
The two men took Jennings by the arms and removed
her from the car, dragging her down to the platform.
She was screaming and her friend was shouting, you'll killer,
don't kill her. And after she had been dumped onto
(11:52):
the platform, the driver went back to his horses and
in an incredibly bold move, before the streetcar could leave,
Elizabeth got up and she marched right back onto the
street car and she sat in a seat. The conductor
was irate, and he ordered the driver to take off
and to drive as quickly as he could until they
found either a police officer or a police station. When
(12:15):
the driver spotted a policeman, he stopped the car and
the conductor spoke with the officer, and after the conductor
told his side of the story, Jennings, who was not
asked to give her version of the story was removed.
The conductor wrote his name and the street car number
on a slip of paper and hand it to her,
and the street car left. Yeah, incidentally, he wrote the
wrong number for the street car on that slip of paper.
(12:38):
It's unknown whether he was trying to hide something or
if he just was incorrect, but just one of the many,
uh many problems of that day. So Elizabeth at this point,
I mean, she had literally been thrown on the ground.
She was kind of a mess. She was normally very
put together, uh really, you know, lovely young woman. And
so she headed home on foot. A bookseller from Germany
(13:01):
had actually approached her, and he said that he had
seen the entire incident, that he would be happy to
serve as a witness, and he gave her his information.
When she got home, her disheveled appearance really frightened her parents.
They had a doctor come and examined her. He put
her on bed rest and mentioned that she might have
broken bones. Yeah, she had a bit of a limp
(13:21):
by the time she got home, and Elizabeth wrote out
everything that had happened at her father's urging. So while
she rested at home, her father took that letter that
she had written to leaders of the black community throughout
Lower Manhattan, and that included Frederick Douglas. A meeting was
called at the First Colored American Congregational Church, Quote for
(13:42):
the purpose of making an expression of public sentiment condemnatory
of the outrage committed upon the person of Miss Elizabeth Jennings,
a highly respectable female. Elizabeth couldn't attend due to her
doctor impost bed rest, so her father went in her
place and read aloud her account of events on the
events on the street car, A five person committee was
(14:05):
formed to examine the facts the incident and to decide
on what the next step should be. They took a
collection to help cover the costs of an attorney. Elizabeth's
account was also sent to the paper, and on July
nineteenth of eighteen fifty four, that story was printed in
the New York Daily Tribune. So while the Tribune was
a New York paper, it had weekly editions that were
(14:26):
mailed to subscribers throughout the country. Thomas Jennings was on
this five man investigative committee. He and his colleagues decided
to fight the street car company for their treatment of
his daughter. They hired attorney Chester A. Arthur, although he
wasn't their first choice. Their first choice had been abolitionist
Erastus D. Culver, but when they met with him, he
(14:48):
referred them to Arthur, who had only been practicing law
for six weeks. Because Culver had been elected to a
judge ship in Brooklyn, he had given the young chester A.
Arthur all of his cases. But Arthur, he was twenty
four at the time, would later go on to become
the twenty first President of the United States, and he
was a strong ally. He had been called his apprentice,
(15:09):
and he was ideologically aligned with his mentor. And Arthur
filed a suit on behalf of Elizabeth Jennings in the
New York State Supreme Court seeking damages from the conductor,
the driver, and the Third Avenue Railway Company. But this
was not just about getting recompense for Elizabeth. The hope
was that this lawsuit, which was filed as a civil
(15:30):
case rather than a criminal case, would change the company
stance on segregated street cars if the Third Avenue Railway
Company lost. Thomas Jennings wrote of the case, quote, the assault,
though a very aggravated case, is only secondary in our
view to the rights of our people. He also made
the point that it was mere custom that kept black
(15:51):
people on segregated street cars. There was no actual law
that said that people of any color couldn't sit on
any street car they wished. That's one of the big
uh not not continual, but but frequently differences between segregation
in the North and the South, is that a lot
of times in the South there were laws specifically saying
all these things, and in the North it was more
(16:12):
common that these were sort of socially enforced but not
actually documented anywhere. At a literary exhibition held at the
First Colored American Congregational Church in the fall of that year,
Elizabeth played the organ and as part of the programming,
speeches were given in support of overthrowing slavery and and
bettering the lives of black people. Events like this continued
(16:34):
to garner support for her case in the community while
they waited for a court date. Yeah, and as this
news was spreading throughout the country, she was receiving letters
of support from around the United States. In the case
of Elizabeth Jennings versus. Third Avenue Railway Company went to
trial the following year, on February eighty the case was
(16:56):
filed and tried in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan because the
company was headquartered there and that courtroom was packed. The
records of the court proceedings are unfortunately lost. Uh. It
is believed that the German bookseller that we mentioned earlier,
Elizabeth's friend Sarah Thomas Jennings, and Elizabeth herself were all witnesses.
They all testified, of course, before a jury that consisted
(17:19):
entirely of white men. After the testimony, Judge William Rockwell's
instructions to the jury made it clear that a company
was legally responsible for the actions of its employees. He
also stated that as a public transportation business, the Third
Avenue Railway Company was quote bound to carry all respectable
persons that colored persons, if sober, well behaved and free
(17:41):
firm disease, had the same rights as others. Those instructions
made news and they were printed in the papers after
the trial. And while they do represent an important moment,
which was a State Supreme Court judge saying that people
of color had the same rights as others, there are
also a lot of qualifiers on those rights, basically saying
that to be entitled to those same rights, they had
(18:04):
to be the right kind of black people. Yeah. Uh.
But after deliberation, the jury returned to the courtroom and
the lead juror handed the judge in the case their decision,
and the paper read quote, the jury has awarded miss
Jennings two dollars plus ten percent for court costs, So
they had won. This was less than half of the
(18:25):
amount that they had filed for, which was five dollars.
But it was also what Elizabeth made in a full
year at her job, and it was greeted as a
huge win, not just for the Jennings but for New
York's black community. We'll talk about what happened after the
trial after we take a break for a word from
a sponsor, Frederick Douglass Paper, which was actually the name
(18:53):
uh that he had changed the north Star to. It
was literally called Frederick Douglass Paper. Uh. He made that change.
In eighteen fifty one ran the story of Jenning's successful
court case with the headline legal rights vindicated and opening
with quote, our readers will rejoice with us in the
righteous verdict given. Other papers across the country also picked
(19:14):
up the story, including Judge Rockwell's words. The Pacific Appeal,
which is a paper published in San Francisco ran the
story with the headline quote A wholesome verdict. The final
paragraph takes the tone of the write up in an
interesting direction. It hints that the writer was more concerned
with people bringing their stinky groceries onto street cars and
then whether a passenger is black. It reads quote railroads, steamboats, omnibuses,
(19:38):
and ferry boats will be admonished from this As to
the rights of respectable colored people, it is high time
that the rights of this class of citizens were ascertained,
and that it should be known whether they are to
be thrust from our public conveyances, while women with a
quarter of mutton or a load of cod fish can
be admitted. O kind cracked me up. Uh, That headline
(20:02):
A wholesome verdict, and the basic story ran in a
bunch of different papers. It's kind of like, uh, you know,
if you'll see an ap story repeated throughout multiple papers today.
Very similarly, the same story ran word for word in
a lot of places. But soon after this case was settled,
the Third Avenue Railroad Company did start integrating its street cars,
and other companies followed suit. But for clarity, it was
(20:26):
not as though they had seen the light and believed
that this was the right thing to do. This was
a business decision. They were really fearful that more lawsuits
could follow and that they would start hemorrhaging money if
more juries made similar decisions. There were a handful of
similar cases over the next two years. While companies were
integrating their street cars. It wasn't as though conductors all
(20:46):
stopped being racist due to those changes. After the ruling,
Thomas Jennings founded the Legal Rights Association. This organization is
sometimes called a precursor to then double a CP, and
it was an advocacy group that helped black New Yorkers
find and pay for legal representation in civil rights cases.
It also lobbied for fair treatment of people of color.
(21:07):
It organized protests and educated the public. Thomas Jennings died
four years after Elizabeth's court case in eighteen fifty nine. Yeah. Unfortunately,
he did not live long enough to see uh some
of the many things that he had fought so hard for.
In eighteen sixty Elizabeth met and married a man named
Charles Graham, who was from St. Croix. Elizabeth and Charles
(21:30):
had a son in eighteen sixty two, named in honor
of Elizabeth's father, Thomas, But unfortunately, Thomas died in infancy
just a year after his birth. Uh. The only thing
that I have found that seems to ever be written
up as the cause of his death is convulsions. Um,
so we don't know the exact nature of his illness.
Charles and Elizabeth actually traveled with Thomas's body from Manhattan
(21:54):
to its burial place in Brooklyn, and that was actually
a trip that was very, very dangerous at this time
because the Civil War draft riots were taking place in
the city. The Graham's, along with Elizabeth's mother, left the
city after that and they moved to New Jersey. Charles
Graham died in eighteen sixty seven. He was only thirty
four and he and Elizabeth had only been married for
seven years. Elizabeth and her mother continued to live together
(22:17):
in the Eton Town area for the next several years.
In eighteen seventy one, the Jennings women moved back to
Lower Manhattan, this time into a home at five forty
three Broom Street. In eighteen seventies three, Elizabeth's mother died,
and Elizabeth had continued to work as a teacher throughout
her life, but after losing her child, her husband and
her mother. In the course of a decade, teaching children
(22:40):
became pretty much the entire focus of her life. Elizabeth
Jennings Graham moved once more after her mother's death, this
time to a house at two thirty seven West forty
one Street, which was closer to the school where she worked.
In eighteen eighty one, Chester A. Arthur became president when
President James A. Garfield was assassinated, and his rise to
(23:01):
the highest office in US government kicked up a bit
of interest in the eighteen fifty five court case again,
but Elizabeth did not seem particularly interested in stepping into
the spotlight. In her home on West forty one Street
became the site of the first free kindergarten for black
children in New York. She also continued to live there,
(23:21):
but she lived on the upper floor and had the
school downstairs. And she was not alone in setting up
this kindergarten. She worked with two other women, Mrs James
Herbert Morse and Mrs Edward Curtis. And the idea of kindergarten,
which was really more supervised play than you know, book learning,
so to speak, was still relatively new. It had been
(23:42):
developed in the eighteen thirties in Germany. But even sixty
years later, though private and then public kindergartens had been
established in some cities in the US, there still were
not any in New York for black children prior to this.
I wish we knew her colleagues names beyond their husband's
name dude too. That happened sometimes when we're researching this
(24:05):
far back in the past. So this was not a
situation that it was like a daycare running out of
Elizabeth's home. The school had a structure, it was funded
through donors, and a teacher named Leoni g Ricord was
hired to manage the curriculum. The lower level of the
home was made into a school room, and the yard
was transformed into an outdoor activity area. Elizabeth Jennings Graham
(24:26):
also ran a lending library out of the house. She
was also the librarian, and on Saturdays the classroom was
used as a sewing school. I love how busy she
was with all of these endeavors well, and she really
was kind of carrying on her father's legacy of like
trying to help people help themselves by becoming more educated
(24:47):
and more skilled and more knowledgeable. And it's a that
family has some pretty good, uh, pretty good values. So
Elizabeth died in her sleep on June five, nine one,
in her home, so that was six years after she
started the school. She worked literally right up until the
day she died, and she was in her seventies at
the time. She was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn.
(25:10):
In two thousand seven, a small street marker appeared on
the corner of Park Row and Spruce Street that read
Elizabeth Jennings Place. It's not the exact intersection where she
was assaulted, but it is nearby that spot and in
a fitting full circle moment for somebody who dedicated her
professional career to teaching. It is the work of school children.
(25:32):
Third and fourth grade students from New York's PS three
sixty one had been studying Elizabeth Jennings Graham and they
got the idea to try to have her commemorated. And
this was not the first time this happened. There was
a previous class that attempted something similar but was not successful.
But the kids collected signatures from area residents and then
with the help of their teachers, they put together their
(25:53):
case to petition the city, and after trying to have
first a playground named for her, which did not pan
out um and in selecting the intersection where she had
boarded that street car, but finding it had already been
given an honorari designation. That alternate corner was chosen by
city officials, but it was approved by the students and
their teachers. So she does have small little recognition, a
(26:15):
little sign that you will see if you are at
the corner of um Park, Row and Spruce, because some
of those streets have also changed names from when she
was there. Do you also have some listener mail for us?
I do. It's really exciting listener mail to me. It
is from our listener John. It is a lot of
information about Carmen Miranda. UM. I'm gonna edit this a
(26:38):
little bit because otherwise it will be a very long
listener mail segment because he has so much info. You
will find out why, but I will try to include
the best parts. Hi, thank you for your show on
Carmen Miranda. I am the writer, director, producer of the
documentary Carmen Miranda, that Girl from Rio for twentieth Century Fox. Uh.
He had not read one of the bios that I read,
but he's putting it on his list, and he said,
(26:59):
while you're unlikely to watch the documentary, it does cover
some areas that you seemed a little less certain about
in your podcast. He also gives a link to it
up on YouTube, which we can share. In the show notes,
he said some important aspects. Carmen Miranda was a comic
songstress in Brazil. She's sang at high end clubs in
the south of the country and her very first performances
of her signature song in the country played on a
(27:21):
caricature of the fruit sellers, and it was in a
film in which she appeared in Brazil, and in it
she is wearing an absurd version of the actual cultural
dress and it bothered no one in Brazil at the time,
because of course it was played for comedy. He gives
us the lyrics. I'm not going to read them out
because that will take a while. But this song, he says,
played on lots of cultural stereotypes that existed in Brazil
(27:41):
and it played very well to the European descendant population.
While she did not sing in black face, there was
an element within Brazilian culture that could relate this to
Al Jolson singing Mammy, which Jolson and the majority of
Americans at the time saw as a celebration of black
culture and not offensive. He goes on some or the
other thing that I wanted to um mentioned from his
(28:04):
his very thorough email, was about that question that we
had about that photograph that was taken unflattering where she
was not wearing any underwear, and it became very scandalous.
And he writes, the photo of Miranda was taken by
the Fox Studio photographer. It was not taken by an
outside photographer. It was posted on a bulletin board on
(28:25):
the lot the next day. I believe the man who
printed the photo was fired, but he had made copies
and he took them off the lot. At the time,
photos like that could not be sold or published openly,
but there was a huge market distributing pornographic images to soldiers.
Most movie goers inside the US never saw the picture. Uh,
that is very very cool, John, Thank you so much.
(28:46):
I watched the first part of the movie. I haven't
gotten to watch the whole thing yet, just because I
have had lack of time. But the opening alone delights
me because it features a really beautiful pink and white costume.
Um and so we, like I said, we will share
that link if people want to watch it. John, thank
you so much for your email. That was fabulous. I'm
glad you cleared up that photo question for us. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
(29:07):
so at History Podcast at housetop works dot com. You
can also find us across the spectrum of social media
as Missed in History, and we are at missed in
History dot com, which is our little corner of the
web where we have every episode of the podcast that
has ever existed, including those before Tracy and I were
ever a part of it. And you'll also find show
notes and things like our sources for the ones that
(29:27):
Tracy and I have worked on. So we encourage you
come and play with us and Missed in History dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
housetop works dot com.
Hey, before we get started, we just wanted to let
you know we have so many upcoming live shows to
talk to you about. Yes, on July seven, I will
be at History Camp Boston. That's me Tracy, only Holly
won't be at that one. I will be in the
History Podcaster panel. And then the next day, July, we
will both be doing a live show at Adams National
(00:20):
Historical Park in Quincy, Massachusetts. It's an outdoor show. It
will happen rainer shine, and since parking is limited at
the park, people are encouraged to take public transportation. That
is probably how I will be getting there. Also in July,
we will be back at Convention Days at Women's Rights
National Historic Park in Seneca Falls, New York. Convention Days
is running from July twenty, and our show is going
(00:43):
to be on Saturday July. And then we have big, big,
big news that we are both very excited about. We
are going on an actual multi city tour. We're going
to hit the East coast in August or we will
be coming to Atlanta, Georgia, Riley, North Carolina, Somerville, Massachusetts, Brooklyn,
New York, and washing To d C. And then in
October my favorite spooky time of year. We will be
(01:04):
coming to the West coast with stops in Seattle, Washington, Portland, Oregon,
and Los Angeles and San Francisco, California. You can find
more information about all these shows at our website, which
is missed in History dot Com. Click on the link
in the menu that says live shows. Welcome to stuff
you missed in History class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(01:32):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy V. Wilson and today's topic. H is a person
who is sometimes called the nineteenth century Rosa Parks. The
comparison is somewhat apt because you'll see as her story unfold.
But while Elizabeth Jennings Graham was raised by parents who
were active in advocating for better quality of life and
(01:53):
for people of color, her involvement and how this thing
played out one was a little bit accidental. Uh So
it wasn't something that was part of a bigger civil
rights movement necessarily. Uh it just kind of happened. The
other thing that's interesting, and that makes them very different,
is that while the story of Rosa Parks and the
(02:15):
Montgomery bus boycott and the part she played in it
became very much a part of history that remains talked about.
For a long time, Elizabeth Jennings Graham kind of fell
off the radar and people lost the thread of her
part of history and her uh work for improvement of
the quality of life of black people in nineteenth century
(02:36):
New York. Yeah, it's way earlier than the Montgomery bus
boycott and also not in the South. Yeah, it is
a hundred years earlier. It's like, um, so the Montgomery
bus boycott happened in this incident, initial incident that that
catalyzed this whole thing started in eighteen fifty four. Parts
(02:57):
of it continued into eighteen fifty five, so almost exactly
a hundred years fascinating story, and again it kind of
got lost for a while, but some historians have really
picked up the the flag and kind of done some
research and really investigated who this person was. And there's
also a fun little tag at the end of this
about how kids are starting to learn more and more
(03:18):
about her story. So, the date of Elizabeth Jennings Graham's
birth is completely unknown. We don't have any idea what
the month or the date of her birth was. Her
death certificate at lists eighteen twenty six is the year
of her birth, but a census that was conducted in
eighteen fifty lists it as eighteen thirty. We'll talk a
(03:40):
little bit later about something that gives a clue about
which of those might be more correct, but we still
don't know what would have caused that discrepancy in the
first place. And Elizabeth's father, Thomas Jennings, was the first
black man to hold a U. S. Patent, which he
was awarded in the early eighteen twenties. He had begun
his professional life in tailoring, and he had invented a
(04:00):
means to clean clothes using solvents. It was an early
version of dry cleaning. I have read in some places
it was called dry scouring, but we don't actually have
the text of the patent. He and Elizabeth's mother, who
was also named Elizabeth, were part of New York's black
middle class. They lived at one sixty seven Church Street
in Lower Manhattan, and they were active in the community,
(04:21):
working on improving the lives of other black citizens. Slavery
had been abolished in New York during Thomas's lifetime, over
the course of a series of laws between seventeen and eight.
These phased out the institution of slavery in New York incrementally,
and he had used his patent money to purchase the
freedom of some of his family members. Yeah, he had
(04:43):
been born free, but not everyone in his family had been.
And Thomas had long been involved in activism against racial injustice.
He attended the first three National Conventions of Free People
of Color, which began in eighteen thirty, and he helped
found the Wilberforce Philanthropic Society helped black citizens improve their lives.
Thomas and his wife Elizabeth had at least four other children.
(05:06):
In addition to their daughter Elizabeth, there were two boys
and two girls we know about named William Thomas Junior, Matilda,
and Lucy. The children all attended school. This is the
time when education wasn't a given for children of any background.
Public schools were established in New York in the early
eighteen hundreds, but there weren't any kind of requirements to
attend school, and a lot of children were working at
(05:29):
jobs at a very early age. The Jennings children were
a lot more educated than many other children in New York,
and from a young age, Elizabeth followed in her family's
ideology of fighting against racial injustice. At the age of ten,
she recited an essay at a gathering of the Ladies
Literary Society of the City of New York entitled on
(05:50):
the Improvement of the Mind, which was later published in
the paper The Colored American. That paper was published in
eighteen thirty seven, So if she was ten at the time,
this supports that eighteen twenty six year of birth a
little bit more than we have anything to support the
eighteen thirty year. Although Elizabeth Jennings was born a free woman,
she was also still a black woman, and she grew
(06:11):
up in a largely de facto segregated New York. Slavery
was not abolished at the at the federal level at
the time of the primary event that we're talking about today,
the Fugitive Slave Act of eighteen fifty was still in effect.
That act required that enslaved people who ran away to
non slaved states be captured and returned to their owners.
(06:33):
Aiding someone who escaped enslavement was also illegal. Free black
men and women in states that had abolished slavery feared
that they could be kidnapped and transported to a slave state,
even though they had not been enslaved. Yeah, that was
a very real concern because how they would have no
way to fight that if someone dragged them into a
(06:56):
slave state and sold them, they have no of course
against it. At that point. It was really dangerous time. Yeah,
we've we've talked about it in episodes before and talked
about people even the taking the step of if they
had the means, moving to Canada to get away from
the risk of being sold into slavery. In the United States,
there also were not a lot of job prospects for
(07:16):
a young person of color to aspire to, even in
New York. Ministry and teaching jobs were some of the
few non labor positions that were available to black citizens,
and those positions were finite. They could only minister or
teach other people of color. But the Jennings children really
seemed to do quite well for themselves. William ended up
(07:37):
becoming a businessman. I believe he moved to Boston. Thomas Jr.
Was a dentist. Uh, he moved to New Orleans, I think,
and Matilda was a dressmaker. Elizabeth became a teacher. I
read one thing where in eighteen fifty five she was
one of only thirteen black teachers in New York uh
and after a year of teaching at Colored Public School
(07:57):
Number two, she worked in the system that was a
ablished by the New York Society for the Promotion of
Education among Colored Children, which was a better school system
for her, and she also worked as a church organist.
On July fifty four, Jennings was traveling to the first
Colored American Congregational Church preparing to a company the afternoon
(08:18):
choir practice. As usual, she walked a short distance from
the Jennings home to a street car stop at the
corner of Pearl and Shay them She ran into her
friends Sarah E. Adams as she walked, and the two
of them walked together to the stop. She tried to
board a horse drawn street car, which was run by
the Third Avenue Railway Company. Horse Drawn street cars normally
(08:40):
had two men who were running them. There was the
driver and the conductor, and the street car company had
a policy against allowing black passengers. This was a common
policy on street cars. Often black people who wanted to
take a street car would have to wait for one
with a sign that indicated that people of color were
allowed to board, but those were not as frequent as
(09:01):
cars that only accepted white passengers. The problem of the
transportation system and its treatment of black people was not new,
and a rapidly growing city like New York, street cars
were increasingly relied upon by the city's inhabitants, and activists
had been writing about the poor treatment of black travelers
for more than two decades before this point. And we're
(09:23):
gonna pause a little bit early for our sponsor break here,
because I want to keep the account of what actually
happened once the street car came all together. So we're
gonna jump right back in after we first have this pause.
Elizabeth was a little bit worried about making it to
(09:44):
the church to accompany the choir on time, so she
took a chance. Sometimes a conductor would allow a black
passenger to board if none of the other passengers objected,
And so when Elizabeth explained her predicament to the conductor,
he was not sympathetic. He told her she could just
wait for the next car, and she wrote about this
(10:04):
incident quote he told me that the other car had
my people in it, that it was appropriated for that purpose.
I then told him I had no people. It was
no particular occasion I wished to go to church, as
I had been doing for the last six months, and
I did not wish to be detained. So even though
the conductor had told her to get off the street car,
Elizabeth stayed on. She said she would take the next
(10:25):
one if it was one that would take black passengers,
but she was going to stay on the current one
until I got there. When the second street car came,
it was full, which was another problem that arose from
the scarcity of cars that allowed black passengers, and this
set up a battle of wills. Both Elizabeth and the
conductor of the car she was standing on. We're willing
(10:46):
to stand their ground and wait for the other one
to give in. Eventually, though it was the driver's desire
to get going that led the conductor to yield. Elizabeth
was no shrinking Violet, and even as she was allowed
to boy word, she told the conductor that she didn't
know where he was born, but that she was a
New Yorker and that she had never been treated so
poorly while attempting to go to church, and that he
(11:09):
was an impudent fellow. The conductor answered that he was
from Ireland. When she replied that she didn't care where
he was from she only cared that quote. He behaved
himself and did not insult genteel persons. To set the
conductor off, he physically removed Elizabeth's friend Sarah, and then
dragged Elizabeth herself out. She attempted to resist by holding
(11:32):
onto the window sash, and after a bit of a struggle,
the conductor told the driver to come out and help him.
The two men took Jennings by the arms and removed
her from the car, dragging her down to the platform.
She was screaming and her friend was shouting, you'll killer,
don't kill her. And after she had been dumped onto
(11:52):
the platform, the driver went back to his horses and
in an incredibly bold move, before the streetcar could leave,
Elizabeth got up and she marched right back onto the
street car and she sat in a seat. The conductor
was irate, and he ordered the driver to take off
and to drive as quickly as he could until they
found either a police officer or a police station. When
(12:15):
the driver spotted a policeman, he stopped the car and
the conductor spoke with the officer, and after the conductor
told his side of the story, Jennings, who was not
asked to give her version of the story was removed.
The conductor wrote his name and the street car number
on a slip of paper and hand it to her,
and the street car left. Yeah, incidentally, he wrote the
wrong number for the street car on that slip of paper.
(12:38):
It's unknown whether he was trying to hide something or
if he just was incorrect, but just one of the many,
uh many problems of that day. So Elizabeth at this point,
I mean, she had literally been thrown on the ground.
She was kind of a mess. She was normally very
put together, uh really, you know, lovely young woman. And
so she headed home on foot. A bookseller from Germany
(13:01):
had actually approached her, and he said that he had
seen the entire incident, that he would be happy to
serve as a witness, and he gave her his information.
When she got home, her disheveled appearance really frightened her parents.
They had a doctor come and examined her. He put
her on bed rest and mentioned that she might have
broken bones. Yeah, she had a bit of a limp
(13:21):
by the time she got home, and Elizabeth wrote out
everything that had happened at her father's urging. So while
she rested at home, her father took that letter that
she had written to leaders of the black community throughout
Lower Manhattan, and that included Frederick Douglas. A meeting was
called at the First Colored American Congregational Church, Quote for
(13:42):
the purpose of making an expression of public sentiment condemnatory
of the outrage committed upon the person of Miss Elizabeth Jennings,
a highly respectable female. Elizabeth couldn't attend due to her
doctor impost bed rest, so her father went in her
place and read aloud her account of events on the
events on the street car, A five person committee was
(14:05):
formed to examine the facts the incident and to decide
on what the next step should be. They took a
collection to help cover the costs of an attorney. Elizabeth's
account was also sent to the paper, and on July
nineteenth of eighteen fifty four, that story was printed in
the New York Daily Tribune. So while the Tribune was
a New York paper, it had weekly editions that were
(14:26):
mailed to subscribers throughout the country. Thomas Jennings was on
this five man investigative committee. He and his colleagues decided
to fight the street car company for their treatment of
his daughter. They hired attorney Chester A. Arthur, although he
wasn't their first choice. Their first choice had been abolitionist
Erastus D. Culver, but when they met with him, he
(14:48):
referred them to Arthur, who had only been practicing law
for six weeks. Because Culver had been elected to a
judge ship in Brooklyn, he had given the young chester A.
Arthur all of his cases. But Arthur, he was twenty
four at the time, would later go on to become
the twenty first President of the United States, and he
was a strong ally. He had been called his apprentice,
(15:09):
and he was ideologically aligned with his mentor. And Arthur
filed a suit on behalf of Elizabeth Jennings in the
New York State Supreme Court seeking damages from the conductor,
the driver, and the Third Avenue Railway Company. But this
was not just about getting recompense for Elizabeth. The hope
was that this lawsuit, which was filed as a civil
(15:30):
case rather than a criminal case, would change the company
stance on segregated street cars if the Third Avenue Railway
Company lost. Thomas Jennings wrote of the case, quote, the assault,
though a very aggravated case, is only secondary in our
view to the rights of our people. He also made
the point that it was mere custom that kept black
(15:51):
people on segregated street cars. There was no actual law
that said that people of any color couldn't sit on
any street car they wished. That's one of the big
uh not not continual, but but frequently differences between segregation
in the North and the South, is that a lot
of times in the South there were laws specifically saying
all these things, and in the North it was more
(16:12):
common that these were sort of socially enforced but not
actually documented anywhere. At a literary exhibition held at the
First Colored American Congregational Church in the fall of that year,
Elizabeth played the organ and as part of the programming,
speeches were given in support of overthrowing slavery and and
bettering the lives of black people. Events like this continued
(16:34):
to garner support for her case in the community while
they waited for a court date. Yeah, and as this
news was spreading throughout the country, she was receiving letters
of support from around the United States. In the case
of Elizabeth Jennings versus. Third Avenue Railway Company went to
trial the following year, on February eighty the case was
(16:56):
filed and tried in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan because the
company was headquartered there and that courtroom was packed. The
records of the court proceedings are unfortunately lost. Uh. It
is believed that the German bookseller that we mentioned earlier,
Elizabeth's friend Sarah Thomas Jennings, and Elizabeth herself were all witnesses.
They all testified, of course, before a jury that consisted
(17:19):
entirely of white men. After the testimony, Judge William Rockwell's
instructions to the jury made it clear that a company
was legally responsible for the actions of its employees. He
also stated that as a public transportation business, the Third
Avenue Railway Company was quote bound to carry all respectable
persons that colored persons, if sober, well behaved and free
(17:41):
firm disease, had the same rights as others. Those instructions
made news and they were printed in the papers after
the trial. And while they do represent an important moment,
which was a State Supreme Court judge saying that people
of color had the same rights as others, there are
also a lot of qualifiers on those rights, basically saying
that to be entitled to those same rights, they had
(18:04):
to be the right kind of black people. Yeah. Uh.
But after deliberation, the jury returned to the courtroom and
the lead juror handed the judge in the case their decision,
and the paper read quote, the jury has awarded miss
Jennings two dollars plus ten percent for court costs, So
they had won. This was less than half of the
(18:25):
amount that they had filed for, which was five dollars.
But it was also what Elizabeth made in a full
year at her job, and it was greeted as a
huge win, not just for the Jennings but for New
York's black community. We'll talk about what happened after the
trial after we take a break for a word from
a sponsor, Frederick Douglass Paper, which was actually the name
(18:53):
uh that he had changed the north Star to. It
was literally called Frederick Douglass Paper. Uh. He made that change.
In eighteen fifty one ran the story of Jenning's successful
court case with the headline legal rights vindicated and opening
with quote, our readers will rejoice with us in the
righteous verdict given. Other papers across the country also picked
(19:14):
up the story, including Judge Rockwell's words. The Pacific Appeal,
which is a paper published in San Francisco ran the
story with the headline quote A wholesome verdict. The final
paragraph takes the tone of the write up in an
interesting direction. It hints that the writer was more concerned
with people bringing their stinky groceries onto street cars and
then whether a passenger is black. It reads quote railroads, steamboats, omnibuses,
(19:38):
and ferry boats will be admonished from this As to
the rights of respectable colored people, it is high time
that the rights of this class of citizens were ascertained,
and that it should be known whether they are to
be thrust from our public conveyances, while women with a
quarter of mutton or a load of cod fish can
be admitted. O kind cracked me up. Uh, That headline
(20:02):
A wholesome verdict, and the basic story ran in a
bunch of different papers. It's kind of like, uh, you know,
if you'll see an ap story repeated throughout multiple papers today.
Very similarly, the same story ran word for word in
a lot of places. But soon after this case was settled,
the Third Avenue Railroad Company did start integrating its street cars,
and other companies followed suit. But for clarity, it was
(20:26):
not as though they had seen the light and believed
that this was the right thing to do. This was
a business decision. They were really fearful that more lawsuits
could follow and that they would start hemorrhaging money if
more juries made similar decisions. There were a handful of
similar cases over the next two years. While companies were
integrating their street cars. It wasn't as though conductors all
(20:46):
stopped being racist due to those changes. After the ruling,
Thomas Jennings founded the Legal Rights Association. This organization is
sometimes called a precursor to then double a CP, and
it was an advocacy group that helped black New Yorkers
find and pay for legal representation in civil rights cases.
It also lobbied for fair treatment of people of color.
(21:07):
It organized protests and educated the public. Thomas Jennings died
four years after Elizabeth's court case in eighteen fifty nine. Yeah. Unfortunately,
he did not live long enough to see uh some
of the many things that he had fought so hard for.
In eighteen sixty Elizabeth met and married a man named
Charles Graham, who was from St. Croix. Elizabeth and Charles
(21:30):
had a son in eighteen sixty two, named in honor
of Elizabeth's father, Thomas, But unfortunately, Thomas died in infancy
just a year after his birth. Uh. The only thing
that I have found that seems to ever be written
up as the cause of his death is convulsions. Um,
so we don't know the exact nature of his illness.
Charles and Elizabeth actually traveled with Thomas's body from Manhattan
(21:54):
to its burial place in Brooklyn, and that was actually
a trip that was very, very dangerous at this time
because the Civil War draft riots were taking place in
the city. The Graham's, along with Elizabeth's mother, left the
city after that and they moved to New Jersey. Charles
Graham died in eighteen sixty seven. He was only thirty
four and he and Elizabeth had only been married for
seven years. Elizabeth and her mother continued to live together
(22:17):
in the Eton Town area for the next several years.
In eighteen seventy one, the Jennings women moved back to
Lower Manhattan, this time into a home at five forty
three Broom Street. In eighteen seventies three, Elizabeth's mother died,
and Elizabeth had continued to work as a teacher throughout
her life, but after losing her child, her husband and
her mother. In the course of a decade, teaching children
(22:40):
became pretty much the entire focus of her life. Elizabeth
Jennings Graham moved once more after her mother's death, this
time to a house at two thirty seven West forty
one Street, which was closer to the school where she worked.
In eighteen eighty one, Chester A. Arthur became president when
President James A. Garfield was assassinated, and his rise to
(23:01):
the highest office in US government kicked up a bit
of interest in the eighteen fifty five court case again,
but Elizabeth did not seem particularly interested in stepping into
the spotlight. In her home on West forty one Street
became the site of the first free kindergarten for black
children in New York. She also continued to live there,
(23:21):
but she lived on the upper floor and had the
school downstairs. And she was not alone in setting up
this kindergarten. She worked with two other women, Mrs James
Herbert Morse and Mrs Edward Curtis. And the idea of kindergarten,
which was really more supervised play than you know, book learning,
so to speak, was still relatively new. It had been
(23:42):
developed in the eighteen thirties in Germany. But even sixty
years later, though private and then public kindergartens had been
established in some cities in the US, there still were
not any in New York for black children prior to this.
I wish we knew her colleagues names beyond their husband's
name dude too. That happened sometimes when we're researching this
(24:05):
far back in the past. So this was not a
situation that it was like a daycare running out of
Elizabeth's home. The school had a structure, it was funded
through donors, and a teacher named Leoni g Ricord was
hired to manage the curriculum. The lower level of the
home was made into a school room, and the yard
was transformed into an outdoor activity area. Elizabeth Jennings Graham
(24:26):
also ran a lending library out of the house. She
was also the librarian, and on Saturdays the classroom was
used as a sewing school. I love how busy she
was with all of these endeavors well, and she really
was kind of carrying on her father's legacy of like
trying to help people help themselves by becoming more educated
(24:47):
and more skilled and more knowledgeable. And it's a that
family has some pretty good, uh, pretty good values. So
Elizabeth died in her sleep on June five, nine one,
in her home, so that was six years after she
started the school. She worked literally right up until the
day she died, and she was in her seventies at
the time. She was buried in Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn.
(25:10):
In two thousand seven, a small street marker appeared on
the corner of Park Row and Spruce Street that read
Elizabeth Jennings Place. It's not the exact intersection where she
was assaulted, but it is nearby that spot and in
a fitting full circle moment for somebody who dedicated her
professional career to teaching. It is the work of school children.
(25:32):
Third and fourth grade students from New York's PS three
sixty one had been studying Elizabeth Jennings Graham and they
got the idea to try to have her commemorated. And
this was not the first time this happened. There was
a previous class that attempted something similar but was not successful.
But the kids collected signatures from area residents and then
with the help of their teachers, they put together their
(25:53):
case to petition the city, and after trying to have
first a playground named for her, which did not pan
out um and in selecting the intersection where she had
boarded that street car, but finding it had already been
given an honorari designation. That alternate corner was chosen by
city officials, but it was approved by the students and
their teachers. So she does have small little recognition, a
(26:15):
little sign that you will see if you are at
the corner of um Park, Row and Spruce, because some
of those streets have also changed names from when she
was there. Do you also have some listener mail for us?
I do. It's really exciting listener mail to me. It
is from our listener John. It is a lot of
information about Carmen Miranda. UM. I'm gonna edit this a
(26:38):
little bit because otherwise it will be a very long
listener mail segment because he has so much info. You
will find out why, but I will try to include
the best parts. Hi, thank you for your show on
Carmen Miranda. I am the writer, director, producer of the
documentary Carmen Miranda, that Girl from Rio for twentieth Century Fox. Uh.
He had not read one of the bios that I read,
but he's putting it on his list, and he said,
(26:59):
while you're unlikely to watch the documentary, it does cover
some areas that you seemed a little less certain about
in your podcast. He also gives a link to it
up on YouTube, which we can share. In the show notes,
he said some important aspects. Carmen Miranda was a comic
songstress in Brazil. She's sang at high end clubs in
the south of the country and her very first performances
of her signature song in the country played on a
(27:21):
caricature of the fruit sellers, and it was in a
film in which she appeared in Brazil, and in it
she is wearing an absurd version of the actual cultural
dress and it bothered no one in Brazil at the time,
because of course it was played for comedy. He gives
us the lyrics. I'm not going to read them out
because that will take a while. But this song, he says,
played on lots of cultural stereotypes that existed in Brazil
(27:41):
and it played very well to the European descendant population.
While she did not sing in black face, there was
an element within Brazilian culture that could relate this to
Al Jolson singing Mammy, which Jolson and the majority of
Americans at the time saw as a celebration of black
culture and not offensive. He goes on some or the
other thing that I wanted to um mentioned from his
(28:04):
his very thorough email, was about that question that we
had about that photograph that was taken unflattering where she
was not wearing any underwear, and it became very scandalous.
And he writes, the photo of Miranda was taken by
the Fox Studio photographer. It was not taken by an
outside photographer. It was posted on a bulletin board on
(28:25):
the lot the next day. I believe the man who
printed the photo was fired, but he had made copies
and he took them off the lot. At the time,
photos like that could not be sold or published openly,
but there was a huge market distributing pornographic images to soldiers.
Most movie goers inside the US never saw the picture. Uh,
that is very very cool, John, Thank you so much.
(28:46):
I watched the first part of the movie. I haven't
gotten to watch the whole thing yet, just because I
have had lack of time. But the opening alone delights
me because it features a really beautiful pink and white costume.
Um and so we, like I said, we will share
that link if people want to watch it. John, thank
you so much for your email. That was fabulous. I'm
glad you cleared up that photo question for us. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
(29:07):
so at History Podcast at housetop works dot com. You
can also find us across the spectrum of social media
as Missed in History, and we are at missed in
History dot com, which is our little corner of the
web where we have every episode of the podcast that
has ever existed, including those before Tracy and I were
ever a part of it. And you'll also find show
notes and things like our sources for the ones that
(29:27):
Tracy and I have worked on. So we encourage you
come and play with us and Missed in History dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
housetop works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Intentionally Disturbing
Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.