Unsung heroes

One of the shortfalls of Black History Month is a shortfall by history in general: Too many heroes go unsung. One hundred and three years before Rosa Parks took a stand by sitting down, Lizzie Jennings made the fight that desegregated public transit in New York. And her 25-year-old lawyer, Chester A. Arthur, became president of the United States 26 years later.

On Sunday, July 16, 1854, Lizzie Jennings and Sarah Adams were in a hurry to get to the First Colored Congregational Church in Manhattan because Lizzie was scheduled to play the organ. The first streetcar to come by was not designated "colored permitted," meaning that it was up to the teamster whether to permit her aboard. When he told her to wait, Lizzie replied: "I am a respectable person born and raised in New York." He said he was from Ireland and didn't care. Lizzie and Sarah were physically removed by the driver and a policeman. He had not chosen his victim wisely.

Lizzie was a college-educated schoolteacher whose father, Thomas Jennings, was the first African-American ever to obtain a patent. He was a tailor with a prominent clientele in both the white and black communities. The story made headlines and leaders of the fledgling civil rights community convinced her to contact abolitionist lawyer Erastus Culver and sue. Culver's associate was Chester A. Arthur.

Chet Arthur was a true believer in the abolitionist cause. His father, William Arthur, was a Baptist Minister who kept getting fired because all he could sermonize about was slavery, and his congregations thought he should switch to topics like salvation and sin every once in a while. Young Chet graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Union College, passed the bar and got a job working for ex-Congressman Culver. Shortly after Culver took Lizzie's case he was appointed to a judgeship and Chet was on his own. He made the crafty call of filing in Kings County (Brooklyn) where the transit company had its headquarters, rather than New York County (Manhattan) which was the scene of the crime. Brooklynites, who crowded the Plymouth Congregational Church to listen to abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe) were a more sympathetic jury pool.

Arthur convinced Circuit Court Judge William Rockwell to charge the jury that: "Colored persons, if sober, well-behaved and free of disease have the same rights as others and could neither be excluded by any rule of the company, nor by force or violence." The jury reached a quotient verdict of $225 and streetcar companies in New York dropped their segregationist policies. For over 50 years the anniversary of the verdict was marked by a parade.

Chet ventured to "Bleeding Kansas" to support the abolitionist struggle there, but realized that the crossfire is no place to set up a successful practice. When he returned to New York he was a logical choice to assist the preeminent William Evarts in the appeal of the Lemmon Slave Case.

In 1851, Jonathan Lemmon relocated his household from Virginia to Texas and decided that a steamship ride from New York to New Orleans should be part of his itinerary. When he arrived in New York with eight slaves, a freed black man named Louis Napoleon found out about it and hired Culver and John Jay, son of the first chief justice, to seek a writ of habeus corpus on their behalf. Slavery was illegal in New York, but Lemmon said he was just passing through. The judge set a briefing schedule, but ordered the slaves freed in the interim. To no one's shock, they disappeared.

Merchants who did business with the south raised $5,280 to compensate Lemmon, but the state of Virginia intervened, hoping to set up a dogfight. By 1860 the case had finally wended its way through the appellate process and was ready for Supreme Court review. Three years earlier the court had ruled in the Dred Scott decision that it was unconstitutional for Congress to outlaw slavery in the Northwest Territories because that violated the Fifth Amendment. But the Bill of Rights had not yet been extended to the states, so it was now time to examine the constitutionality of state anti-slavery laws. Had the Lemmon case ever been decided it would have supplanted Dred Scott in American memory, but the Civil War left the issue to men in blue and gray uniforms instead of black robes.

Chet Arthur became a connected lawyer and a Republican bigshot. He was nominated for vice president to salve a party rift in 1880 and became president when James A. Garfield was assassinated. He's the only president never to have won an election on his own in his entire life. Despite being a surprisingly good president, he couldn't get re-nominated.

Biographer Thomas Reeves argues that Arthur never got cynical in middle age and retained most of the romanticism and empathy of his youth. He leaned on Congress to water down Chinese exclusion laws and advocated, mostly unsuccessfully, on behalf of Native American interests. When it was called to his attention that a black South Carolinian named Johnson Chestnut Whitaker had been railroaded out of West Point, supposedly for concocting a story that he had been beaten, Arthur had him reinstated.

Historians avoid Chet Arthur for a variety of reasons. Though there is no actual proof, the stench of corruption engulfed him, and his unseemly ascent to office wins him no fans. But oddly enough, part of the reason why is because he left them little to write about. Two days before his death he summoned an old political pal and his son Alan to the backyard of his brownstone and burned all his personal records. Maybe he was trying to hide something, and maybe he wasn't. After all, he was once quoted saying what every president since has felt: "I may be president of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damned business."