Altadena Historical Society, NAACP to Honor Activist, Abolitionist

A headstone will be placed at the unmarked grave of former Altadena resident and abolitionist Ellen Garrison Clark at 11 a.m. Saturday at Mountain View Cemetery, 2400 N. Fair Oaks Ave., Altadena.

“Ellen Garrison Clark committed her life to the betterment of African-Americans,” said Pasadena NAACP President Allen Edson. “We recognize her contributions to civil rights and education and look forward to hearing the community familiarize themselves with her work. The NAACP PASADENA has contributed funds to her headstone as a thank you for her work. Clark is a hero whose contributions have been made to the Altadena/Pasadena community have not gone unnoticed”

Long before Rosa Parks took a stand against segregation when she refused to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama, Garrison took her own stand when she tested the limits of the nation’s first civil rights act in May 1866 when she forcibly ejected from a segregated waiting room at a Baltimore train station after she took a seat.

Garrison contacted a local newspaper and filed a lawsuit against the railroad, according to the Robbins House, a Concord-based nonprofit focused on raising awareness of Concord’s African, African American, and antislavery history from the 17th to 19th century.

After being removed by force, Garrison returned to the train station with witnesses.

In less than 90 days, a Maryland grand jury dismissed her suit against the railroad.

“I feel as though I ought to strive to maintain my rights… it will be a stand for others,” she said.

But that wasn’t Garrison’s first foray into activism. When she was just 12 years old she marched in a Concord parade hand-in-hand with her white schoolmate. Despite earlier reservations, her mother allowed Garrison, who was the only African-American student in the school, to participate.

Born in 1823 in Concord, her father, Jack Garrison, escaped slavery. Her mother, Susan Robbins Garrison, is listed as the daughter of Caesar Robbins, a farmer who fought in the Revolutionary War.

Susan Robbins was one of the founders of the Ladies’ Antislavery Society of Concord. Robbins’ and Garrison stood with other abolitionists in the area that opposed the racist treatment of Cherokee Native Americans by the U.S. government, according to an article by Herb Boyd in the Amsterdam News.

Sometime after her mother’s death in the 1840s, Ellen joined the African Baptist Church in Boston and teaching, and again challenged the system this time by opposing petitions against discrimination in the public transportation and the school systems.

Eventually, she moved to Pasadena like many other abolitionists, including Owen Brown, son of John Brown, who orchestrated the ill-fated raid at Harper’s Ferry. According to records, she died of “consumption” on Dec. 20, 1892.

“I have a great desire to go and labor among the freedmen of the South. I think it is our duty as a people to spend our lives in trying to elevate our own race. Who can feel for us if we do not feel for ourselves?” she wrote on her application to become a teacher.