Ellen Garrison Jackson Clark lived a courageous life. Then she wound up in an unmarked grave. Now, 129 years later, she's getting her due.
In celebration of Juneteenth, this week we're running some of our favorite episodes about the Black experience.
L.A. Times features writer Jeanette Marantos takes us from modern-day Southern California back to 1860s Massachusetts and Maryland for a look at an unsung civil rights hero. This episode first aired on Sep 24, 2021.
Read the full transcript here.
Host: L.A. Times features writer Jeanette Marantos
More reading:
She was the Rosa Parks of her day. So why was she in an unmarked grave for 129 years?
How we got the story of Ellen Garrison Jackson Clark and her courageous, unsung life
LA Times Today: The ‘Rosa Parks of Concord MA,’ discovered in an unmarked grave in Altadena
Gustavo Hey, what’s up? This is Gustavo Arellano.
In celebration of Juneteenth, this week we're running some of our favorite episodes about the Black experience.
And today… we’ve got one from last September. It’s hosted by my L.A. Times colleague … features writer Jeanette Marantos. She takes us from modern-day Southern California … back to 1860s Massachusetts and Maryland … for a look at an unsung civil rights hero.
Jeanette Marantos I'm Jeanette Marantos. You're listening to the Times Daily News from the L.A. Times.
Memorial pastor We're here on this auspicious occasion to dedicate the grave marking the headstone of this great freedom fighter
Jeanette Marantos [00:00:55] in the northwest corner of Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery, one of LA’s oldest graveyards, about 100 people are praying over a new headstone, marking the spot where Black educator and activist Ellen Garrison Clark laid unsung and forgotten for 129 years.
Memorial pastor [00:01:16] While Miss Clark is only now being recognized in this class, let me tell you, her reward has already been laid up for her in a place where it can never be denied, in a place where it can never be taken away.
Jeanette Marantos [00:01:35] It's a hot, sunny day in Altadena, a community nestled on the foothills in the San Gabriel Mountains, about 20 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Areas of the city were exempt from redlining, which kept African Americans from owning homes in many parts of Southern California.
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I found out about Clark by accident while mining the internet for Juneteenth events around L.A. The notice from the Altadena Historical Society was just a few sentences long, but once I began unraveling her story, I was stunned by the things I learned about this fearless woman. Clark was the granddaughter of a freed man who fought in the Revolutionary War. She grew up educated and refined in Concord, Massachusetts. Her mother was friends with families of some of America's greatest thinkers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Yet after the Civil War, she chose to spend most of her adult life alone in hostile Southern states, teaching freed people how to read and write. Her only protection during that time was her own sense of worth and a paper passport signed by a Massachusetts judge to show she was born free with no owner but herself.
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One of Clark's most courageous acts came in 1866 as a test to see what rights Black Americans really had after the Civil War. She went to court arguing that law-abiding African Americans should be able to sit wherever they choose in a train station waiting room — nearly 90 years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
Her achievements were extraordinary for any woman of her time, especially a single Black woman who stood no taller than 5 foot 2. But for me, it only deepened the mystery. If Ellen Garrison Jackson Clark was the Rosa Parks of her day, why was she in an unmarked grave in Altadena for 129 years?
We will have more after this break.
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Jeanette Marantos: Historians have spent decades trying to piece together the lives of early civil rights activists like Clark. In years past, the work was daunting, with researchers scrolling through newspapers on microfiche and local libraries looking for obituaries or visiting courthouses to decipher faint and spidery handwriting in 19th century ledgers. But the digitization of records has eased the way, and slowly, a fragmented picture of Clark's life has emerged.
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Ellen Garrison was born free in 1823 in Concord, Massachusetts, but her family was well acquainted with bondage. Her grandfather, Caesar Robbins, was a onetime slave who won his freedom by fighting against the British in the American Revolution. Her father, Jack Garrison, escaped his enslavers in New Jersey and ran to Concord, where he lived as a farmer and fugitive the rest of his life.
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Her mother, Susan Robbins Garrison, socialized with the abolitionists and transcendentalists who made Concord famous for its liberal leanings, joining Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife, Lidian, and Henry David Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia, as charter members of the Concord Female Antislavery Society in 1837.
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Susan Garrison was the only Black member of the group and she hosted its second meeting in her home. So activism was a family habit. By the time Clark was 15, she was signing petitions demanding equal rights for Native Americans and advocating desegregation of Massachusetts trains and Boston schools.
She excelled at school and set her sights on teaching, one of the few careers available to American women in the 1800s. In 1857 at age 34. Clark married John W. Jackson, a free Black farmer from Delaware, but he died a few years later.
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Teaching became her passion. She taught at a private school in Newport, Rhode Island. But during the Civil War, she felt a higher calling to work with the American Missionary Association to teach former slaves to read and write throughout Virginia and Maryland, she wrote in her application letter.
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VO [00:07:45] Sirs, I have a great desire to go and labor among the freedmen of the South. I think it is our duty as a people to spend our lives in trying to elevate our own race.
Jeanette Marantos [00:07:55] The work was hard, teaching regular classes six days a week and religious lessons on Sundays. And outside of the classroom, Clark endured the daily indignities of racism. In one letter, she wrote:
VO [00:08:09] I have generally walked the streets unmolested. It is only occasionally that I have been beaten and stoned in the street.
Jeanette Marantos [00:08:17] Clark also recounted a story of a man who stepped on her dress and complained she was walking too slowly on the sidewalk. He called her the N-word and threatened to slap her on the mouth, but she did not retreat.
VO [00:08:30] I have found one thing about these people. If they attack you, be careful to stand your ground and they will leave you. But if you run, they will follow.
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Jeanette Marantos [00:08:48] That fortitude came to bear on May 9th, 1866, when Clark wrote that she and fellow Black teacher Mary Anderson were, quote, literally thrown from the ladies sitting room at the Baltimore train depot.
VO [00:09:04] This is the first time that I have felt it to be my duty to make any serious complaint, but an outrage has just occurred that demands attention. We were injured in our persons as well as our feelings, for it was with no gentle hand. I feel the effects of it still,
Jeanette Marantos: Clark's employer in Baltimore encouraged her to pursue a lawsuit. She wrote:
VO: He wishes to ascertain whether respectable people have rights which are to be respected. But you see, it will be a question of much importance. It will not benefit us merely as such, but it will be a stand for others.
Jeanette Marantos: Clark and Anderson wanted the station master, Adam Smyzer, held accountable. They say he posed as a police officer while he dragged them out of the depot. Historians say the suit was meant as a test of the new Civil Rights Act, passed the month before.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 made American-born Black people citizens of the United States and supposedly granted them rights, quote, enjoyed by white citizens.
But did it give them access to a segregated waiting room? Clark and Anderson intended to find out.
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Their legal action made headlines in an era when respectable women did not draw attention to themselves. And Clark was the very definition of respectable.
VO: I had no idea of the sensation it would create.
Jeanette Marantos [00:10:32] Clark wrote on May 21st, 1866.
VO [00:10:36] It certainly requires a great degree of moral courage to act in this matter.
Jeanette Marantos [00:10:41] The opponent’s council tried unsuccessfully to get Clark and Anderson to settle out of court.
VO [00:10:46] We could not agree to compromise unless we can have all of our rights conceded to us.
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Jeanette Marantos [00:10:53] Then the stationmaster's counsel seized the upper hand by requesting a jury trial, which would only include white men.
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One result was that Clark and Anderson were sent home to await notice of a future court date. And although Clark was assured that authorities
Ashlea VO [00:11:11] promised to notify us whenever we were wanted,
Jeanette Marantos [00:11:14] the case was ultimately dismissed on July 8th, 1866. The reason: Clark and Anderson never appeared on the day of trial.
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Given Clark's earlier refusal to settle, the case’s outcome puzzles historians. Did Clark give up? Was notice of the court dates sent to the wrong address? Or was it intentionally withheld to deny Clark and Anderson their day in court? Researchers don't have an answer. Clark doesn't mention the case again in her letters, and news coverage of the trial stopped. When funding for employer ended around 1870, Clark lost her teaching job. Then she seemed to disappear.
We will have more after this break.
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Jeanette Marantos: So how did people link an unmarked grave in Altadena, California, to Ellen Garrison Jackson Clark? It took a village of historians to uncover the little bits we know about the rest of her life.
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Christina Lenore Davis from Savannah State University in Georgia discovered Clark went to work for the Pennsylvania Quakers in the 1870s, teaching in schools around North Carolina.
The Robbins House Museum in Concord, established in the rustic building that once housed Clark and her family, got grants to hire researchers. John Hannigan, curator of the Massachusetts Archives, learned that Clark moved to Great Bend, Kansas, in the 1880s to teach the “Exodusters,” formerly enslaved people who made an exodus to Kansas looking for land while trying to escape racial violence in the South.
Clark finally remarried in Kansas to a widowed settler named Harvey Clark. It was an old deed of sale for his homestead, discovered by Great Bend Historical Society researcher Karen P. Neuforth, that led historians to learn that the Clarks moved to Pasadena, California, around 1890. Hannigan went on to discover a few more details: That Clark died in 1892 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Mountain View Cemetery. She had died from consumption — tuberculosis — at age 69 and may have come to California hoping for a warm-weather cure, said thousands of others at that time. Researchers couldn't find any more details about the final months of Clark's life, but all were shocked to discover that her grave didn't have a headstone. The Robbins House Museum offered to buy a marker, but the cemetery initially refused: That required permission from next of kin. But Clark never had children. As far as anyone knows. She had no living family members.
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Enter the predominantly white and graying members of the Altadena Historical Society. Until this spring, they knew nothing of the research and Ellen Clarke, but they, too, were looking to uncover long-neglected history in a city where 23% of the residents are Black.
Vanessa [00:15:33] Who knew that right here in Altadena possessed a key to help us learn the true history of this country right here in plain view at Mountain View Mortuary.
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Jeanette Marantos [00:15:45] The Altadena Historical Society seized the opportunity to honor Clark, raising $8,000, mostly from members of the Black community, to purchase a headstone and recognize her legacy.
Vanessa [00:15:58] She served us, even though she was back in the eighteen hundreds, She’s still serving us.
Jeanette Marantos [00:16:04] Organizer Veronica Jones, one of the society's few Black members, had another motive for seeking money from the Black community: Contributors automatically became members of the society, instantly diversifying the organization.
Vanessa [00:16:22] I want to say, when I reached out to my family, friends and community, not one person said no. Not one person said no. Everybody wanted to be a part of this history making event. Everybody wanted to know about Ellen Garrison Clark.
Jeanette Marantos [00:16:39] Clark's belated celebration of life was sent for Juneteenth, the holiday commemorating June 19th, 1865, when word of the Emancipation Proclamation belatedly reached enslaved people in Texas. By now, the cemetery owner enthusiastically waived its installation fees and the need for authorization for next of kin.
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Memorial singer [00:17:02] Soon I will be done with the trouble of the world, trouble of the world, trouble …
Jeanette Marantos [00:17:17] the unveiling brought together a diverse standing room only crowd at Mountain View Cemetery, and most fittingly, the ceremony was streamed live to the rustic Robbins House Museum in Concord, the actual building where Clark was born.
Through speeches and songs, prayers and tears, those gathered remembered the heroic life of a woman who once wrote, “I think it our duty as a people to spend our lives in trying to elevate our own race.”
Memorial Singer [00:17:50] No more weeping and a-wailing…
Jeanette Marantos [00:18:00] Then it was time for the unveiling. A simple granite marker inscribed “educator, civil rights activist Ellen Garrison Clark” with her birthdate and the day she died. The Historical Society embellished her marker with a small hummingbird, inspired by the Mayan belief that they were the messengers for the gods and a saying that Clark both embodied and embraced: “We must lift as we climb.”
Memorial Singer [00:18:33] Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world. I'm going home to live with God.
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Gustavo [00:18:51]
And that’s it for this episode of The Times: daily news from the L.A. Times.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Brousalian, David Toledo, Ashlea Brown, and Angel Carreras. Our editorial assistant is Madalyn Amato. Our intern is Surya Hendry. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilera and Shani Hilton. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen. Special thanks to Lauren Raab.
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