More than a century before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, Elizabeth Jennings, 24, shook up New York City when she refused to dismount a streetcar in 1854 because she was running late for church. She clung to a window frame and then the conductor’s coat before a police officer threw her off — but not before she put the driver in his place.

“I told him,” Jennings wrote soon after, “that I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, did not know where he was born and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church.”

With the help of the eventual 21st president, Chester A. Arthur, who was a lawyer at the time, Jennings later sued the streetcar manufacturer, the Third Avenue Railway Company, and won. She pocketed nearly $250 in damages, and the city’s transit system was mostly integrated within the next six years.

Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward became the first licensed black female physician in the state — and only the third black woman nationwide to receive a medical degree — after she graduated valedictorian of her class at New York Medical College in 1870. She was also a political pioneer, helping to found the Equal Suffrage League in Brooklyn and the Women’s Loyal Union, New York’s leading black women’s club, with her sister, Sarah J. S. Garnet, who became the first black female principal in a city public school in 1863.