Jessie Lee Garner was an African American woman who, in the depths of Jim Crow, successfully sued the municipal bus company of Jackson, Mississippi over being attacked by a white man seeking her seat in the colored section of the bus. An all-white jury awarded her damages of $1,000 (about $22,000 in 2024 dollars) — a rare legal victory for a Black citizen of the American South in the white supremacist courts of the period. [1] [2]
On August 31, 1936, Garner was six months pregnant and waiting for a bus outside Sutton's Ice Cream Parlor in Jackson. When it arrived, Garner took a seat in the section of the bus reserved for African Americans. As the bus followed its route, the white section of the bus became crowded, with all seats taken. [2] [1]
Outside the Edwards Hotel in downtown Jackson, a young white man walked back to the African American section of the bus and, "with rude and profane language," ordered Garner to stand up and give him her seat in the colored section. Garner responded by noting her pregnancy but saying she would in any event be exiting the bus shortly at Farish Street. The man punched her twice in the head, knocking her to the bus floor, knocking out several pieces of dental work and leaving her eyes badly swollen. She suffered a miscarriage soon thereafter and was bedridden from August 31 until mid-November. [2] [3]
Garner sued the Mississippi Power & Light Company (today part of Entergy), claiming negligence. Mississippi's Jim Crow laws mandated that buses, like trains, have "by a partition or adjustable screen...so as to secure separate accommodations for the white and colored races." Mississippi statute required "a partition constructed of metal, wood, strong cloth or other material." [4] [2] [3]
Garner argued that if the bus had had a physical partition — as opposed to simply a small tin sign labeling the sections for each race — the assault would not have occurred. The bus company, one of Garner's three white attorneys would write, knew that the lack of a partition "would very probably result in the injury to law-abiding, peaceable colored persons who were passengers on its buses, and that the proximate cause of the injury suffered by appellee was the failure of the power company to comply with the law, which directed them to separate the races." [5] [6]
Rather than attack the constitutionality of Jim Crow, her lawyers' strategy — in front of an all-white jury — was instead to accept it as a set of laws meant to preserve peace between the races and to appeal to "the paternalist sentiments of the jurors." [2] The approach succeeded. The jury awarded Garner $1,000, both for her medical expenses and because she had "suffered great pain and mental anguish."
Mississippi Power & Light appealed the verdict to the Supreme Court of Mississippi, arguing that the lack of a partition was not the proximate cause of the attack. But on October 18, 1937, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court decision. [1] [2] [6] In its decision, Justice George H. Ethridge wrote that the "object of the law in requiring separation of the races...is to avoid outbreaks and conflicts which mar the public peace." [3]
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American activist in the civil rights movement, best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many state "Jim Crow laws" re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. Such legally enforced segregation in the South lasted into the 1960s.
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955—the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for her refusal to surrender her seat to a white person—to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which nominally guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all people. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each race were equal, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by race, which was already the case throughout the states of the former Confederacy. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate".
Boynton v. Virginia, 364 U.S. 454 (1960), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court. The case overturned a judgment convicting an African American law student for trespassing by being in a restaurant in a bus terminal which was "whites only". It held that racial segregation in public transportation was illegal because such segregation violated the Interstate Commerce Act, which broadly forbade discrimination in interstate passenger transportation. It moreover held that bus transportation was sufficiently related to interstate commerce to allow the United States federal government to regulate it to forbid racial discrimination in the industry.
Irene Amos Morgan, later known as Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, was an African-American woman from Baltimore, Maryland, who was arrested in Middlesex County, Virginia, in 1944 under a state law imposing racial segregation in public facilities and transportation. She was traveling on an interstate bus that operated under federal law and regulations. She refused to give up her seat in what the driver said was the "white section". At the time she worked for a defense contractor on the production line for B-26 Marauders.
Edgar Daniel Nixon, known as E. D. Nixon, was an American civil rights leader and union organizer in Alabama who played a crucial role in organizing the landmark Montgomery bus boycott there in 1955. The boycott highlighted the issues of segregation in the South, was upheld for more than a year by black residents, and nearly brought the city-owned bus system to bankruptcy. It ended in December 1956, after the United States Supreme Court ruled in the related case, Browder v. Gayle (1956), that the local and state laws were unconstitutional, and ordered the state to end bus segregation.
This is a timeline of African-American history, the part of history that deals with African Americans.
Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475 (1954), was a landmark case, "the first and only Mexican-American civil-rights case heard and decided by the United States Supreme Court during the post-World War II period." In a unanimous ruling, the court held that Mexican Americans and all other nationality groups in the United States have equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The ruling was written by Chief Justice Earl Warren. This was the first case in which Mexican-American lawyers had appeared before the Supreme Court.
The Constitution of Mississippi is the primary organizing law for the U.S. state of Mississippi delineating the duties, powers, structures, and functions of the state government. Mississippi's original constitution was adopted at a constitutional convention held at Washington, Mississippi in advance of the western portion of the territory's admission to the Union in 1817. The current state constitution was adopted in 1890 following the reconstruction period. It has been amended and updated 100 times in since its adoption in 1890, with some sections being changed or repealed altogether. The most recent modification to the constitution occurred in November 2020, when Section 140 was amended, and Sections 141-143 were repealed.
Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898), is a United States Supreme Court case that reviewed provisions of the 1890 Mississippi constitution and its statutes that set requirements for voter registration, including poll tax, literacy tests, the grandfather clause, and the requirement that only registered voters could serve on juries. The plaintiff, Henry Williams, claimed that Mississippi's voting laws were upheld with the intent to disenfranchise African Americans, thus violating the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court did not find discrimination in the state's laws because, even though the laws made discrimination possible, the laws themselves did not discriminate against African Americans. The court found that any discrimination toward African Americans was performed by the administrative officers enforcing the law and that there was no judicial remedy for this kind of discrimination.
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Segregation in countries by type (in some countries, categories overlap) | |
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