People, Locations, Episodes

Mary Ellen Pleasant, Entrepreneur born

Mary E. Pleasant

*On this date, in 1814, Mary Ellen Pleasant was born. For over fifty years, she was a Black abolitionist, businesswoman, and entrepreneur in the San Francisco Gold Rush heyday.

From Philadelphia, she was educated in Nantucket and, while in Boston, began associations with William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists, including Alexander Smith, whom she married.  After his death and the willingness of money, she moved west, spending time in Canada Westin working with abolitionists and fugitive slaves near Chatham in the late 1850s.  At this time, she met John Brown, where the raid on Harper’s Ferry was planned.

By the 1860s, she moved to San Francisco, where she became a restaurateur and investor. At 920 Washington Street (in the heart of today’s Chinatown), her best-known establishment was the meeting place of some of the city’s most prominent politicians. Mary Pleasant challenged Jim Crow laws in her case against the North Beach Railroad Co. in 1868, and she testified in a highly publicized trial Sharon v. Sharon of 1884.

She was well aware of the distortions of her character in the press, contending that though they (the press) were smart, she was smarter. Historians of the West describe her as a madam, voodoo queen, and prostitute. Pleasant herself requested that the words “she was a friend of John Brown” be printed on her grave.  Mary Ellen Pleasant died in 1904.

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