Georgia (c 1814- January 11, 1904) age 80 yrs

Mary Ellen Pleasant was the mother of Civil Rights in California. She was the most powerful Black woman in Gold Rush-era San Francisco. Accounts differ on where she was born and whether she was enslaved or born free. Pleasant was a 19th century entrepreneur, financier, real estate magnate and abolitionist. She was arguably the first African American self-made millionaire. She worked on the Underground Railroad as a young adult. She ushered enslaved people out of the south and into the northern states. Pleasant gave shelter to fugitive slave Archy Lee when he was on the run. Near the end of her life, she told a reporter. She said she helped fund the militant abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 raid on a Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. She spent the final years of her life in controversy. This was due to her relationship with her business partner, a wealthy Scotsman named Thomas Bell. The few wealthy African American women of the era were easy targets for those concerned with maintaining white supremacy. Pleasant died in 1904, at her wish, her tombstone describes her as “a friend of John Brown.”