Charlotte L. Brown
[2][3] Some time between 1850 and 1860 they moved their family to San Francisco, which was booming as a result of the California Gold Rush, and became a part of that city's burgeoning black middle class.
[16] 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.
In his judgment of October 5, 1864, Judge Orville C. Pratt of the 12th District Court upheld the earlier verdict in favor of Brown, ruling that excluding passengers from streetcars because of their race was illegal.
He had no desire, he said in his ruling, to "perpetuate a relic of barbarism": "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", Judge Pratt stated.
[19] After the first trial, the black-owned newspaper the Pacific Appeal noted that the verdict in her favor "establishes the right, by law, of colored persons to ride in such conveyances".
"While the law recognizes and gives us the right to ride in such conveyances," the editorial continued, "there are a certain number of the employees of this Company, who, if a colored person attempts to cross the street while their car is passing, are seized with a sudden fit of Negrophobia, which is generally manifested by pulling their alarm bell violently, as if some danger was imminent, so afraid are they that some other of our respectable females might attempt to exercise the right that Miss Brown has just won.
Using a racial epithet, it accused Pratt of being partial to African Americans, and questioned whether the light-skinned Brown was really black, or just filing suit for the monetary award.
[30] In 1867, Charlotte Brown opened a school for young children at 10 Scotland Street in San Francisco, offering "all the branches of primary education" as well as music and embroidery.
[31] In 1874, she married James Henry Riker,[32] another prominent African American activist of San Francisco, who had worked as a live-in personal servant to William Chapman Ralston and was employed as a steward at the Palace Hotel during their marriage.
[38] The society pages of the black newspaper The Elevator printed an announcement in 1877 of a surprise party for a fellow steward at the Palace Hotel that was given by Charlotte and James H Riker in their residence on 1018 Powell Street in San Francisco.
[citation needed] The Charlotte Brown lawsuit was one of the first of several actions that were brought by black activists in both Southern and Northern cities throughout the United States to protest exclusion and segregation on public transportation in the 19th and 20th centuries.
