Journey From Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit [Book Review]

Abstract

In 1867, when New Orleans blacks protested the segregation practices of private streetcar companies by boarding white-only horse cars, the military Reconstruction commander in that city ordered the cars integrated. In 1887, the newly established Interstate Commerce Commission harshly. condemned the unequal facilities for blacks on southern railroads. In 1942, a black soldier who sat in a white-only section of a bus in Beaumont, Texas, was arrested, then beaten and shot by policemen. In 1955, when civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to move from a white seat in a Montgomery, Alabama bus, she started a massive boycott that brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to international prominence. In 1962, a sixty-one-year old white "freedom rider" suffered permanent brain damage after being beaten by white counter-protesters on an interstate bus in Anniston, Alabama. Yet in 1964, when Congress finally repassed the 1875 Civil Rights Act rule against segregation in public transit, the end of this most symbolic facet of the Jim Crow system received little praise from the civil rights movement and little opposition from the white South. These incidents and scores of others, legal and extralegal, are treated in this first comprehensive analysis of the history of segregated public transit in the South. Catherine Barnes's pithy, understated book is a solid combination of legal and social history. It should be read by anyone interested in the twisted path of race relations in America.

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