WHY COLORED PEOPLE IN PHILADELPHIA ARE EXCLUDED FROM THE STREET CARS

Philadelphia: Merrihew & Son, 1866. First Edition. Pamphlet. Interior fresh with small bit of corner dampstaining not affecting text; faint vertical crease. Very Good in a Fine clamshell box. Pamphlet (5-3/8" x 8-3/4") likely removed from a bound collection of pamphlets and without its covers; (i-iii), 4-27, (1) pages. Housed in a handsome gilt-lettered blue morocco-backed blue cloth clamshell box. Elusive Reconstruction-Era pamphlet published to promote the desegregation of Philadelphia's street cars, appearing the same year Congress overrode President Andrew Johnson's veto of the Civil Rights Act and submitted the 14th Amendment to the states for ratification, leading to its passage in 1868. One of the earliest works to document African Americans' post-Civil War fight for their rights against embedded racism that would lead to the failure of Reconstruction. "The chain of the slave was broken but not taken off; and any degree of civil disability under which an emancipated slave is left, is just so much slavery left.... So long as the law degrades a man, his neighbor will degrade him" (page 23). "No sooner did railway companies put tracks and cars on the streets of Philadelphia in 1833 than the white owners and managers created policies that excluded African Americans ... by racially segregating the space inside the cars the streetcar companies did more than separate black and white bodies; they spatially claimed the rights to modern transportation for whites... [and] separated blacks from fundamental rights provided to all citizens"(Zylstra in TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE, Volume 52:4, pages 682-686). The issue of segregated transport became a national cause in January, 1865, when Robert Smalls, a black war hero and later a U.S. congressman, was ejected from a Philadelphia streetcar and forced to walk several miles to the navy yard where the Confederate transport ship he had commandeered, as a slave, from the Charleston harbor three years earlier was being repaired. When the Philadelphia black community and its representatives, identified here as the Committee, witnessed the increasingly "violent measures that conductors and drivers used to prevent blacks from entering the streetcars' white space, it created as much public and legal controversy as possible. Between 1861 and 1867 blacks who had been forcibly removed from streetcars brought 13 separate suits against companies or their conductors. Nine of these were criminal cases, and four were tried in civil courts. Philadelphia grand juries rejected all but two of the civil suits" (Zylstra, pages 696-697). Attributed by Charles Blockson (4375) to white abolitionist William D. Kelley, a Radical Republican leader who represented Pennsylvania in the U.S. Congress from 1861 to 1890. (Inventory #: 021987)