Celebrating Black History Month: Sarah Mayrant Walker Fossett

Public transportation is a fundamental piece of a more sustainable society. It is also a great equalizer, a place where people of various walks of life meet together and share similar experiences of travel.

When most people think of Black History month, they think of figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and the “I have a dream” speech or Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. But before Rosa Parks pushed to desegregate public buses in 1955, here in Cincinnati in 1859 Sarah Mayrant Walker Fossett fought for the rights of black women to ride the horse-drawn streetcars.

Photo courtesy of Wendell P. Dabney’s Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens

Local historian, writer, and friend to the environment Sean E. Andres covered Sarah Mayrant Walker Fossett in a piece in 2019. Read more about her incredible story over on the Queens of Queen City blog. 

Queens of Queen City is a part of Urbanist Media, the anti-racist community preservation non-profit founded by Deqah Hussein-Wetzel, who wrote the language for the historical marker which was recently placed to commemorate Sarah Mayrant Walker Fossett along with her husband Peter. You can visit the marker for yourself located at the First Baptist Church in South Cumminsville, which the couple founded in 1870.