As Black Americans struggled against discrimination throughout the 20th century, public transportation was frequently a venue where activists resisted segregation and demanded equality. Often, those struggles intersected with other movements, like organized labor and feminism.
20th Century Resistance Through Labor
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Black men working in transit were often hired as porters, a poorly paid job responsible for carrying luggage, assisting passengers, and maintaining train cars. In the 1920s, they organized as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), the first Black-led union to be recognized in the U.S.
The Brotherhood would not have been nearly as successful without the contributions of the Ladies Auxiliary of the BSCP, made up of the porters’ wives and other Black women. Despite being “overshadowed by their male counterparts” and living within a “double bind of racism and sexism”, the women continued to organize, fundraise, canvass, advocate, and more – all to bridge justice across racial, gender, and labor lines.
Nearly 20 years later, as the fight for economic opportunities surged, Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. led a boycott of two private Manhattan bus lines that refused to hire Black people in any role outside of that of a porter, which resulted in the lines hiring 100 Black drivers and 70 Black maintenance workers.
Because of how oppressive, discriminatory, and segregated it was to move by bus, Black people sometimes took the work into their own hands. In Detroit, a network of Black-run cab companies provided safe and affordable rides for Black people who were denied service by white-owned taxi companies.
In North Carolina, a group of 21 Black drivers in Winston-Salem founded the Safe Bus Company. From 1926 to 1968, the Safe Bus Company provided transportation to Black people in the region; once the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1968, the the city’s transit system contracted with the Safe Bus Company to open bus doors to all city residents until 1972. This nearly fifty-year operation was the largest Black-owned and operated transportation business in the world.
After World War II, Black workers were also responsible for building the new Interstate Highway system, including major projects like the Alaskan Highway that connects the 50th state to the continental U.S.
And still, mistreatment continued, as Black Army Corps of Engineers laborers of the African American 95th Engineer Regiment, were given hand tools to use rather than bulldozers and other machinery reserved for the white Regiment.
Black Women
Black women in particular this era were leading and resisting in a uniquely intersectional way, sacrificing their blood, sweat, tears, money, mental and emotional health.
The ping-pong of justice was never more clear in landmark court cases where Black women led the charge.
In 1868, a private police officer violently attacked Kate Brown after she boarded a train. She sued the railway company, and in 1873, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in her favor.
Just ten years later, Ida B. Wells was forcibly removed from a train for refusing to move from the ladies’ car to the smoking car. Though she challenged her removal in the Supreme Court of Tennessee, she ultimately lost.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Barbara Pope refused to leave the train compartment reserved for white people. She was arrested, fined, appealed her conviction, got her fine refunded, sued the railway company for mistreatment – only to be awarded one cent by the Supreme Court of D.C., insultingly far from her ask of $20,000 in damages. In 1944, Irene Morgan refused to give up her Greyhound seat to a white passenger.
As a result, she was arrested and fined, but she fought back all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in her favor and struck down segregation on interstate buses.
Katherine “Kittie” Knox, of Cambridge and Boston, became the first Black person accepted into the League of the American Wheelmen, an organization that promoted cycling for fun, fitness, and transportation. Her inclusion was a significant act of resistance, demonstrating how joy and leisure have always been just as essential in actualizing justice.
The 1940s saw the rise to Black women breaking barriers and working in transit. Maya Angelou (yes, that one) became San Francisco’s first Black streetcar operator, with Arcola Philipcott following suit as Los Angeles’s first just a few years later. Forty years later, Carmen E. Turner became the first Black woman to lead a major transit agency as the General Manager of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) in D.C.
And the connection between transportation justice and education justice cannot be ignored, as seen through the efforts like ending segregated busing in Boston Public Schools to simply provide children with the transportation needed for them to get to school.
Black mothers and fathers in Clarendon, South Carolina, filed Briggs v. Elliott in 1947; although the court ruled against them and upheld segregation in 1951, their case paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education that was to come seven years later.
Did you know? The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded in 1925, played a key role in financing and organizing the Civil Rights Movement that began thirty years later in 1954.
Civil Rights Era
Enter the 1950s, or the beginning of the Civil Rights Era. Monumental strides to equality and equity took place during this time.
Prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, there was an eight-day Baton Rouge Bus Boycott that protested segregation on city buses. In 1955, after Rosa Parks’ arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, the Black community in Montgomery organized a year-long bus boycott, led in part by Dr. King. This boycott cratered the city’s transit revenue, and led to the Supreme Court ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional.
Boycotts also took place in Tallahassee and D.C., costing transit systems tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. This even extended into the early 20th century, with a boycott of segregated streetcars in Richmond, Virginia in 1904.
Although landmark legislation in the 1960s legally ended segregation, new laws did not eradicate the discriminatory policies and practices that had already permeated every corner of American life. Instead, that discrimination adapted and evolved, becoming more sinister and covert, into the modern day.
Systemic barriers to mobility continue to shape racial and economic disparities in transportation access, and that’s where we’ll pick up next in the third and final part of this series later this week.
