Charlotte Brown
Charlotte Brown was from a prominent African-
American family in San Francisco, California when
she refused a conductor’s demand that she remove
herself from a streetcar because “colored persons were
not allowed to ride.” This was on April 17, 1863, nearly
a hundred years before Rosa Parks challenged public
streetcar segregation in Montgomery, Alabama in
1954.
In 1863, San Francisco had the largest Black population
in the state of California. It was the era of California
Gold Rush that drew many entrepreneurs to its western
shore. African-American migrants to the region were
faced with a social climate that included a prohibition
against the public vote. They could not ride public
transportation, nor could they use the public library.
Like other African-Americans across the nation, they
could only attend segregated public schools.
On April 17, 1863, Brown had a doctor’s appointment
that was the reason for her boarding the Omnibus
Railroad streetcar. She walked onto the horse-drawn
streetcar and took a seat midway in the car. The
conductor walked down the aisle to collect passenger
tickets. Brown wrote that she “handed him my ticket
and he refused to take it. He said that colored persons
were not allowed to ride.” Instead of accepting the
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ticket, the conductor demanded that Brown remove
herself from the streetcar. When Brown refused,
she was forcibly removed by the streetcar attendant.
Charlotte Brown’s father, an owner of a livery
service, helped protect fugitive slaves seeking
freedom in California. He encouraged her to
fight this treatment in court. That same year, a
law had been passed in the California legislature
that allowed African-Americans to testify in cases
involving whites. Brown’s father would bring a
lawsuit on her behalf in a California court.
The Omnibus Railroad argued that its streetcar
conductor was justified for his action because racial
segregation was necessary to protect European
American women and children who might be
“fearful or repulsed” by sitting alongside an African-
American. This argument was unsuccessful. The
judge sided with Brown, but the damage award
was only 5 cent — reimbursement of the cost of the
streetcar fare.
Only days after this court judgment, another
Omnibus streetcar conductor forced Charlotte
Brown and her father from a streetcar. Another
lawsuit ensued. In 1864, Judge C. C. Pratt of the 12th
District Court ruled that San Francisco streetcar
segregation was illegal, stating in his opinion: “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.”
Brown was awarded $500 from the jury in this
second civil rights case. Without the support of the
14th Amendment — which was not in existence
at the time — Charlotte Brown challenged racial
discrimination. She took a stand against racial
justice on the streets of San Francisco, fueling a long
tradition of civil rights activism among African-
American women.
Credit: Blackpast.org