Pleasant, Mary Ellen

Impact on the world

Arriving in San Francisco around 1852 with capital inherited from her late first husband, an abolitionist of considerable means, Pleasant worked as a cook and housekeeper for the city's wealthiest men while quietly investing the intelligence she gathered at their dinner tables — stock tips, mining leads, real estate opportunities — into a diversified portfolio of laundries, boardinghouses, loans at high interest, and mining and railroad stock; by the 1890 census she listed her occupation simply as “capitalist.” She used her “one-woman social agency” to place formerly enslaved and free Black arrivals in jobs and housing throughout California, and in 1866 successfully sued two San Francisco streetcar companies for refusing her a seat, a case the California Supreme Court used to rule streetcar segregation unconstitutional statewide — work that later earned her the title “Mother of Civil Rights in California.” She has also been credibly linked by multiple historians to a roughly $30,000 donation that helped finance John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, a connection she asked to have inscribed on her own tombstone: “She was a friend of John Brown.”

Life & background

Born around August 19, 1814 — by her own most consistent account, free, in Philadelphia, though she gave numerous conflicting stories about her origins over her lifetime and other sources suggest she was born enslaved in Georgia or Virginia — Pleasant was sent as a child to live with a Quaker family on Nantucket, Massachusetts, where she worked as a store clerk. She married a wealthy abolitionist, James Smith, in Boston, inheriting his estate after his death in the 1840s, and later remarried John James Pleasants around 1848; before settling permanently in San Francisco, she spent time in the Canadian abolitionist community of Chatham, Ontario, where she met John Brown directly. In her final years she was mired in scandal and lawsuits over her long business partnership and household arrangement with banker Thomas Bell and his family, was eventually declared insolvent, and died in San Francisco on January 11, 1904, at a friend's home; her mansion site is now Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park.

Sources

1. National Park Service; ACLU of Northern California (Gold Chains); Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History