Mary Ellen Pleasant

Mary Ellen Pleasant was probably born on 19 August 1814, though the records of her early life are scant and conflicting. Accounts place her birth in Georgia, Virginia or Philadelphia, and she told different versions of her own story. She spent her early years in Nantucket, Massachusetts, working as a bond servant to the Hussey family, an abolitionist household, and for a time apprenticed with a Boston tailor.

She married James Smith, a wealthy former plantation owner and abolitionist, with whom she worked on the Underground Railroad. After his death in 1848 she inherited a substantial sum and continued as a conductor on the railroad, and she married John James Pleasant around 1848. To avoid trouble with slave catchers, the couple moved to San Francisco in April 1852.

In Gold Rush San Francisco she built a fortune. She ran restaurants and boarding houses for miners and a chain of laundries, and, with the help of clerk Thomas Bell, invested in real estate and mining stocks. She sometimes passed as white in business and helped Black newcomers find work, and by 1875 she had amassed a fortune, listing her profession on an 1890 census form as a capitalist.

Pleasant used her money for the cause of freedom. She financially supported the abolitionist John Brown between 1857 and 1859, and acknowledged giving him about $30,000. She also brought civil rights lawsuits, including against San Francisco's streetcar companies, most of which she won, and one of her cases helped establish that segregating streetcars was unconstitutional in California.

Known in her time as the Black City Hall, and later called the Mother of Civil Rights in California, she died in San Francisco on 11 January 1904. She asked to be remembered as a friend of John Brown, and her tombstone carries those words. Her reputation has long been contested, and the nickname 'Mammy Pleasant' was applied to her by critics, but San Francisco today honours her with a Mary Ellen Pleasant Day and its smallest city park.