MARY ELLEN PLEASANT

Mary Ellen Pleasant was an early pioneer in advancing minority rights in California.

It is believed she was a former slave who migrated to San Francisco in 1852 during the Gold Rush. She found work as a cook and opened boardinghouses for influential men in the city, often overhearing and adopting their investment strategies.

She had inherited a substantial sum of money from her first husband. Investing wisely in Wells Fargo, mining companies and laundries, Pleasant became wealthy and helped finance anti-slavery causes, including abolitionist John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia.

She rescued slaves and pressured San Francisco merchants to hire African Americans.

In the 1866, Pleasant was refused admittance to a street car, because company policy prohibited “colored” people from riding its cars. She sued the company. According to a news report in the Marysville Daily Appeal, she dropped the action only after the company “agreed to convey colored people over their road in the cars the same as white persons.”

Read more about Mary Ellen Pleasant and other women who fought for equal rights in The Time Travelers, a product of The Friends of California Archives, which was written for 4^th to 6^th grade students. It has been included in CA State Library’s CA 175 reading list, which celebrates the state’s 175^th anniversary of statehood.