Sharon E. Wooden
On Sept. 4, 1872, a younger schoolteacher named Emma Coger boarded the steamboat S.S. Merrill in Keokuk. She requested to buy stateroom passage to Quincy, Illinois, however the clerk refused and provided her a second-class ticket, with directions that she ought to take her meals on the open-air deck or within the pantry. Coger refused the ticket.
“I stated, ‘Sir, I’m no servant and won’t eat on the guards or pantry with the servants.’”
After repeated efforts to buy a first-class ticket, Coger sought out a “gentleman” on deck. “I stated, ‘Sir, will you do me a favor?’ He stated, ‘Actually, Miss.” Coger gave him her cash, and he purchased the ticket.
At dinner, Coger took a seat on the women’ desk, not within the pantry. The captain’s spouse exclaimed, “Why, there’s that negro” – to which Coger replied, “If I’m a negro, Madam, I’m as white as you’re.”
What occurred subsequent led Emma Coger to file a lawsuit that also echoes by way of Iowa legislation at this time. Ordered to go away, Coger refused. When two crew members wrenched her up, her grip on the tablecloth despatched dishes and dinner crashing to the ground. Pressure-marched to the door, Coger struggled with the captain, bloodying his nostril.
Coger sued, profitable in Keokuk in addition to on the Iowa Supreme Courtroom. Chief Justice Joseph Beck wrote, the “precept of equality is introduced and secured by the very first phrases of our State structure … ‘All males are, by nature, free and equal.’”
Within the Eighteen Nineties, Homer Plessy and Daniel Desdunes introduced anti-segregation lawsuits in Louisiana as a part of an organized political effort. In 1872, 20 years earlier, Emma Coger did the identical. She put her physique in hurt’s means as a part of an organized political motion.
Recognizing that the tip of slavery was not the tip of injustice, African American males in Illinois known as a conference in 1866. They’d pursue equal rights “each on the poll field and within the courts of justice.” In different phrases, they known as for lawsuits – particularly since that they had no entry, at the moment, to the poll field. Coger’s brother-in-law helped draft the conference’s eloquent demand for “equality … earlier than the bar of American legislation!”
Coger additionally had assist from the Prince Corridor Masons, a corporation dedicated to civil rights work. All 4 profitable Iowa civil rights lawsuits between 1867 and 1875 had been a part of a marketing campaign pressed by the Prince Corridor Masons. The regional grand lodges met in Keokuk shortly earlier than Coger boarded the Merrill, and it’s probably they deliberate the lawsuit at that assembly.
As soon as she arrived dwelling in Quincy, she employed probably the most distinguished legal professional in Keokuk, Daniel F. Miller. Solely by drawing on her political community and their funds might a 20-year-old schoolteacher have employed such high-powered, sympathetic authorized help in one other state. She was not the primary girl to sue a standard provider over race discrimination, however her swimsuit was uncommon for being deliberate in cooperation with organized males.
Coger’s authorized legacy stretched far past her personal lifetime. The attorneys in Brown v. Board of Training cited her case. In Iowa, Coger v. North Western Union Packet Firm stays the bedrock underpinning civil rights. It’s cited in Varnum v. Brien (2009), which protected same-sex marriage; in Gartner v. Iowa Dept. of Public Well being (2013), which assured a married lesbian couple’s proper to listing each dad and mom’ names on a start certificates; and in Deliberate Parenthood of the Heartland v. Reynolds (2018), which held {that a} 72-hour ready interval for a girl searching for an abortion violated the state structure.
In claiming the liberty to journey, Emma Coger began down a path whose remaining vacation spot she couldn’t have imagined.
Sharon E. Wooden is a professor of historical past on the College of Nebraska at Omaha.
March is Iowa Historical past Month
To have fun Iowa Historical past Month, the Register will publish weekly essays from main state historians.
