Transport and bus boycotts in the United States were protests against the racial segregation of transport services. These occurred before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed such forms of discrimination.
In 1841, abolitionist Frederick Douglass and his friend James N. Buffum entered a train car reserved for white passengers in Lynn, Massachusetts. When the conductor ordered them to leave the car, they refused, after which they were forcefully removed.[1][2]
On July 16, 1854, 24-year-old schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings Graham was forcefully expelled by a train conductor after boarding a streetcar without a “Colored Persons Allowed” sign.[3]
In the mid-19th century, San Francisco's horse-drawn streetcar companies only accepted white passengers. On April 17, 1863, schoolteacher Charlotte L. Brown boarded an Omnibus Railroad Company streetcar, when she was approached by the conductor and asked to leave the car. After she objected, he forcefully removed her.[4]
Katherine Brown boarded a train in Alexandria, Virginia, when traveling towards Washington, D.C., on February 8, 1868. She entered "what they call the 'white people's car.'" As she was boarding, a railroad policeman told her to move to a different car. He told her the car she had entered "was for ladies," and "no damned nigger was allowed to ride in that car; never was and never would be." She replied, "This car will do." Following this, the policeman and another employee grabbed Brown and began beating and kicking her. The men threw and dragged her on the boarding platform, threatening to arrest her. After a violent struggle that lasted six minutes, she asked, "What are you going to arrest me for? What have I done? Have I committed robbery? Have I murdered anybody?" Brown's injuries were so severe she was bedridden for several weeks and coughed blood.
Senators Charles Sumner and Justin Morrill called for a formal investigation, and Senator Charles Drake agreed.[5] A resolution was passed on February 10, and the Senate committee heard testimony later that month. Brown sued the railway company for damages and was awarded $1,500 in damages in the district court. The railway company appealed, and the case eventually went before the US Supreme Court. On November 17, 1873, in an opinion delivered by Justice David Davis, the Court held that racial segregation on the railroad line was not allowed under its Congressional charter, which stated "no person shall be excluded from the cars on account of race." Davis dismissed the company's "separate but equal" argument as "an ingenious attempt to evade a compliance with the obvious meaning of the requirement" of the 1863 charter, and decided in favor of Brown.[6]
The Court held that white and black passengers must be treated with equality in the use of the railroad's cars:
It was the discrimination in the use of the cars on account of color where slavery obtained which was the subject of discussion at the time, and not the fact that the colored race could not ride in the cars at all. Congress, in the belief that this discrimination was unjust, acted. It told this company in substance that it could extend its road within the District as desired, but that this discrimination must cease and the colored and white race, in the use of the cars, be placed on an equality. This condition it had the right to impose, and in the temper of Congress at the time, it is manifest the grant could not have been made without it.[7]
Robert Fox, an African American activist, sparked a civil rights battle in Louisville, Kentucky, in October 1870 by entering a segregated streetcar. Fox got in a streetcar with his brother and business partner Samuel alongside their employee, Horace Pearce.[12] They paid their fares and sat down in the white section of the car, in violation of local laws prohibiting black men from riding inside the trolley cars (black women were permitted to ride at the back of the car, but black men were usually only allowed to ride on the platform with the driver or not at all).[13] When John Russell, a white passenger, complained, the driver asked the men to leave. The black passengers refused. Other drivers were called to the scene, and the men were beaten and thrown off the car. In response, a crowd of African Americans gathered outside and began to throw dirt clods and rocks at the streetcar, insisting that the men be allowed to ride. The Fox brothers and Pearce returned to the streetcar and again took seats in the 'white' section, this time holding rocks in their hands to protect themselves. The three men were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. At their trial, the defendants were unable to testify because the judge forbade blacks from testifying against whites. They were found guilty and fined $5 each ($99.48 in today's money (2021))[14][15] Shortly after, Fox filed a charge of assault and battery against the streetcar company in federal court, claiming that separate seating policies based on race were unlawful and the driver's actions were therefore improper. A jury found the company rules to be invalid and awarded damages of $15 to Fox and his fellow riders.[16]
The company defied the jury's finding and continued racially segregated seating. As a result, Louisville black leaders organized "ride-ins" all over the city. Streetcar after streetcar was boarded by African Americans who took seats in the white section. The drivers, in response, left the cars entirely. On several occasions, black passengers drove the cars themselves, to the cheers of black spectators. Gangs of white youths swarmed into the cars, throwing black riders off them. One incident involved an African American youth named Carey Duncan.[17] At 7 P.M. on May 12, he boarded a streetcar, walked past the driver, and sat down among the white passengers. The driver, following the company directive, did not attempt to throw him off. Instead, he stopped the car, lit a cigar, and refused to proceed until the black youth left the white area. The governor, the Louisville chief of police, and other prominent citizens looked on from the sidewalks while a large crowd gathered around the streetcar and began to shout at the youth: "Put him out!" "Hit him!" "Kick him!" "Hang him!". Some of them climbed into the car, yelling insults. Carey Duncan quietly refused to move. The crowd dragged him from his seat, pulled his inert body off the car, and began to beat him. When Duncan started to defend himself, the city police intervened.[18][19]
Duncan was charged with disorderly conduct. His trial was held in Louisville city court and he was fined. The judge delivered a warning to Louisville blacks that further ride-ins would be punished.[18] Louisville newspapers responded by blaming African Americans for the troubles and urging them to stop the ride-ins. "The assumption of their right to ride in the street cars, under the present circumstances, is injudicious, and we hope will not be persisted in," wrote an editor of the Daily Commercial. "To do so may lead to serious trouble."[20] Finally, Mayor John G. Baxter announced he would meet with interested parties on both sides to attempt a settlement.
At the meeting, the streetcar companies finally capitulated, realizing that the federal government was likely to step in and enforce integration if they didn't agree to it themselves.[21] To "avoid serious collisions," the company announced it would allow all passengers to choose their own seating. Afterward, mixed seating became a common practice. Newspapers around the country commented on the demonstrations and their outcome.[21][22][23]
On May 4, 1884, a train conductor with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway[24][25] ordered Ida B. Wells to give up her seat in the first-class ladies' car and move to the smoking car, which was already crowded with other passengers.[26] The previous year, the Supreme Court had ruled against the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 (which had banned racial discrimination in public accommodations). This verdict supported railroad companies that chose to racially segregate their passengers. When Wells refused to give up her seat, the conductor and two men dragged her out of the car. Wells gained publicity in Memphis when she wrote a newspaper article for The Living Way, a Black church weekly, about her treatment on the train. In Memphis, she hired an African American attorney to sue the railroad. When her lawyer was bribed and paid off by the railroad company,[27] she hired a White attorney. She won her case on December 24, 1884, when the local circuit court granted her a $500 award. The railroad company appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court's ruling in 1887. It concluded: "We think it is evident that the purpose of the defendant in error was to harass with a view to this suit, and that her persistence was not in good faith to obtain a comfortable seat for the short ride."[28] Wells was ordered to pay court costs. Her reaction to the higher court's decision revealed her strong convictions on civil rights and religious faith, as she responded: "I felt so disappointed because I had hoped such great things from my suit for my people. ... O God, is there no ... justice in this land for us?"[29][30]
Homer Plessy On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket at the Press Street Depot and boarded a "Whites Only" car of the East Louisiana Railroad in New Orleans, Louisiana, bound for Covington, Louisiana.[31] The action violated Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890, that law required black passengers to be seated in separate passenger cars on Louisiana railroads from white travelers.
Plessy was charged with boarding a "whites-only" car. Plessy pleaded not guilty, contending the law was unconstitutional. He was convicted at the district level. Plessy appealed his case, but the conviction was sustained by the Louisiana Supreme Court. Plessy then appealed to the only court capable of overriding his state's decision, the U.S. Supreme Court. In May 1896, the Supreme Court issued a 7–1 decision against Plessy, ruling that the Louisiana law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and stating that although the Fourteenth Amendment established the legal equality of whites and blacks it did not and could not require the elimination of all "distinctions based upon color". The Court rejected Plessy's arguments that the Louisiana law inherently implied that black people were inferior. The court ushered in racial segregation in the United States by giving states the power to enact criminal statutes that separated black people from society. Segregation impacted the lives of millions of African Americans as they were barred from restaurants, hospitals, hotels, housing, schools, job prospects, and interpersonal relationships because of their skin color. Justice John Marshall Harlan was the only justice who contradicted the Court's decision. Harlan, now known as the "Great Dissenter", wrote, "the Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens", and so the law's distinguishing of passengers' races should have been found unconstitutional.[32]
The Baton Rouge bus boycott was a boycott of city buses launched on June 19, 1953, by African American residents of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who were seeking integration into the system. In the early 1950s, they made up about 80% of the ridership of the city buses and were estimated to account for slightly more than 10,000 passengers based on the $1,600 in daily revenue lost to the boycott and the fare that had recently increased to 15 cents.[33][34] Under Jim Crow rules, black people were forced to sit in the back of the bus, even when the front of the bus was empty. State laws prohibited black citizens from owning private buses outside the city systems.[35]
The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955—the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African American woman, was arrested for not giving her seat to a white person—to December 20, 1956. That day was when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, which led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.[36][37]
The Tallahassee bus boycott was a citywide boycott in Tallahassee, Florida that sought to end racial segregation in the employment and seating arrangements of city buses. On May 26, 1956, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, two Florida A&M University students, were arrested by the Tallahassee Police Department for "placing themselves in a position to incite a riot".[38]:9–10,19
Robert Saunders, representing the NAACP, and Rev. C. K. Steele began talks with city authorities while the local African American community started boycotting the city's buses. The Inter-Civic Council ended the boycott on December 22, 1956.[39]:36 On January 7, 1957, the City Commission repealed the bus-franchise segregation clause because of the United States Supreme Court ruling Browder v. Gayle (1956).[40]
The legislation had been proposed by PresidentJohn F. Kennedy in June 1963, but it was opposed by filibuster in the Senate. After Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed the bill forward. The United States House of Representatives passed the bill on February 10, 1964, and after a 54-day filibuster, it passed the United States Senate on June 19, 1964. The final vote was 290–130 in the House of Representatives and 73–27 in the Senate.[42] After the House agreed to a subsequent Senate amendment, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Johnson at the White House on July 2, 1964.
The Title II of the law Outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce; exempted private clubs without defining the term "private". Title III Prohibited state and municipal governments from denying access to public facilities on grounds of race, color, religion, or national origin. Title IV—desegregation of public education enforced the desegregation of public schools and authorized the U.S. Attorney General to file suits to enforce the act.[43]
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 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".
Racial equality is when people of all races and ethnicities are treated in an egalitarian/equal manner. Racial equality occurs when institutions give individuals legal, moral, and political rights. In present-day Western society, equality among races continues to become normative. Prior to the early 1960s, attaining equality was difficult for African, Asian, and Indigenous people. However, in more recent years, legislation is being passed ensuring that all individuals receive equal opportunities in treatment, education, employment, and other areas of life. Racial equality can refer to equal opportunities or formal equality based on race or refer to equal representation or equality of outcomes for races, also called substantive equality.
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.
Homer Adolph Plessy was an American shoemaker and activist, who was the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. He staged an act of civil disobedience to challenge one of Louisiana's racial segregation laws and bring a test case to force the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of segregation laws. The Court decided against Plessy. The resulting "separate but equal" legal doctrine determined that state-mandated segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution as long as the facilities provided for both black and white people were putatively "equal". The legal precedent set by Plessy v. Ferguson lasted into the mid-20th century, until a series of landmark Supreme Court decisions concerning segregation, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Theodore Judson Jemison, better known as T. J. Jemison, was the president of the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. from 1982 to 1994. It is the largest African-American religious organization. He oversaw the construction of the Baptist World Center in Nashville, Tennessee, the headquarters of his convention.
Browder v. Gayle, 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956), was a case heard before a three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama on Montgomery and Alabama state bus segregation laws. The panel consisted of Middle District of Alabama Judge Frank Minis Johnson, Northern District of Alabama Judge Seybourn Harris Lynne, and Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Rives. The main plaintiffs in the case were Aurelia Browder, Claudette Colvin, Susie McDonald, and Mary Louise Smith. Jeanetta Reese had originally been a plaintiff in the case, but intimidation by segregationists caused her to withdraw in February. She falsely claimed she had not agreed to the lawsuit, which led to an unsuccessful attempt to disbar Fred Gray for supposedly improperly representing her.
The Women's Political Council (WPC), founded in Montgomery, Alabama, was an organization that formed in 1946 that was an early force active in the civil rights movement that was formed to address the racial issues in the city. Members included Mary Fair Burks, Jo Ann Robinson, Maude Ballou, Irene West, Thelma Glass, and Euretta Adair.
Robert Fox was an African-American activist who sparked a civil rights battle in Louisville, Kentucky in October 1870 by entering a segregated streetcar. He was born in Kentucky to Albert and Margaret Fox and worked as an undertaker and a grocer. He died in 1933.
Elizabeth Jennings Graham was an African-American teacher and civil rights figure.
John Howard Ferguson was an American lawyer and judge from Louisiana, most famous as the defendant in the Plessy v. Ferguson case.
The Separate Car Act was a law passed by the Louisiana State Legislature in 1890 which required "equal, but separate" train car accommodations for Black and White passengers within the state. An unsuccessful challenge to this law culminated in the United States Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation.
Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, 64 MCC 769 (1955) is a landmark civil rights case in the United States in which the Interstate Commerce Commission, in response to a bus segregation complaint filed in 1953 by a Women's Army Corps (WAC) private named Sarah Louise Keys, broke with its historic adherence to the Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal doctrine and interpreted the non-discrimination language of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 as banning the segregation of black passengers in buses traveling across state lines.
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, "Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. Such laws remained in force until 1965. Formal and informal segregation policies were present in other areas of the United States as well, even as several states outside the South had banned discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted by white-dominated state legislatures (Redeemers) to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Such continuing racial segregation was also supported by the successful Lily-white movement.
This is a timeline of the civil rights movement in the United States, a nonviolent mid-20th century freedom movement to gain legal equality and the enforcement of constitutional rights for people of color. The goals of the movement included securing equal protection under the law, ending legally institutionalized racial discrimination, and gaining equal access to public facilities, education reform, fair housing, and the ability to vote.
Charlotte L. Brown (1839–?) was an American educator and civil rights activist who was one of the first to legally challenge racial segregation in the United States when she filed a successful lawsuit against a streetcar company in San Francisco in the 1860s after she was forcibly removed from a segregated streetcar. Brown's legal action and the precedent it created led to additional challenges to segregation in San Francisco and within 30 years, California enacted legislation to make such segregation on streetcars illegal statewide.
The Comité des Citoyens was a civil rights group made up of African Americans, whites, and Creoles. It is most well known for its involvement in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Citizens' Committee was opposed to racial segregation and was responsible for multiple demonstrations in which African Americans rode on the "white" cars of trains.
Civil rights in the United States include noted legislation and organized efforts to abolish public and private acts of racial discrimination against Native Americans, African Americans, Asians, Latin Americans, women, the homeless, minority religions, and other groups since the independence of the country.
The East Louisiana Railroad, chartered in 1887, was a railroad in Louisiana and Mississippi, United States. It was formed to connect Pearl River, Louisiana, to Covington, Louisiana, and Lake Pontchartrain.
References
↑ Three Supreme Court rulings in June 2020 confirmed that employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is necessarily a form of discrimination on the basis of sex and is therefore also outlawed by the Civil Rights Act. See Bostock v. Clayton County, and also see below for more details.
↑ Gerald L. Smith, Karen Cotton McDaniel, John A. Hardin, The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia, University Press of Kentucky, July 16, 2015
↑ Marion Brunson Lucas, University Press of Kentucky, June 1, 2003, A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760–1891, Volume 1, p. 297
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