Near as I can tell, the first serious transportation segregation fight occurred shortly after the first railroad opened for business in New England in 1835.
Seems the free blacks in the area wanted to not have to walk around horse shit -- the actual stuff, not a metaphor for pro-slavery whites -- and were willing to pay, only the whites in the area wanted to beat the metaphorical tar out of them for daring to try.
... an appreciable number of the despised race demanded transportation. Scenes of riot and violence took place, and in the then existing state of opinion, it seemed to me that the difficulty could best be met by assigning a special car to our colored citizens.
By the way -- use this as party trivia the next time you're around smart people! --
"scenes of riot and violence" apparently used to be a not-uncommon saying. How did I come to know that? Simple: See how that source text can't be copied and pasted? I didn't want to have to type all of that, so I typed a little and searched for it. Guess which phrase I chose.
So anyway, the birth of modern mass transportation was followed shortly by the birth of the minority behaving itself and the majority rioting.
In a move worthy of 19th century white people, who had previously ruined voting rights for blacks and women in the early 19th century, those same white people ruined peaceful, horseshit-free transportation for blacks.
But things were about to get better, sort of, in places, before they got a lot better, before they got far worse, before they got better bit by bit until they were better than they had been. Today, for example, the biggest segregation issue in public transportation is everyone trying to avoid sitting next to the person who insists on starting unsolicited conversations with people who suddenly realize something very interesting is in the opposite direction.
I got a message from a user in response to my attempt at a Montgomery Bus Boycott history -- I was only about 40 years and an entire industry shy of the goal -- alerting me to a book I in fact had not found:
I wondered if you knew about the book "The Right to Ride" by Dr. Blair Kelley. In it, she describes a streetcar boycott that occurred in 25 states at the turn of the century.
I knew about the streetcar boycott, but a minute of reading, then searching, showed I had missed some significant parts of the segregated transportation fight, including an 1870 fight that will leave all of your body parts smiling.
1870, you'll note, is a full six years before the 1876 stuff I talk about as sort of the beginning, so I'm putting my Underground Railroad cite toys away for at least a night so I can sort through some of this for you.
I looked and hunted and peeked under HTML rocks and found no evidence of even one black person physically objecting to stagecoach segregation; "the existing state of public opinion [also] accounted for the assignment of Negroes to special coaches" is pretty close, but it's not quite there for me. I did, however, find clear references to train segregation defiance:
Massachusetts newspapers in 1838 reported frequent incidents of Negroes refusing to sit in Jim Crow sections and being forcibly removed from the train. Negroes also sought relief through the legislature and white abolitionists encouraged boycotts. As a result, a joint legislative committee recommended a bill to halt discrimination. Negative reaction followed. Fearing increased integration, one state senator declared that “such legislation would not stop at forcing the mixture of Negroes and whites in railroad cars, but would subsequently be applied to hotels, religious societies, and through all ramifications of society.” The act failed to pass.
Forgetting the indignity of being relegated to the back of the train --
the dirt car, according to one writer of a letter to the editor --
the ride was nauseating:
We were stowed away in a large, rough car, with windows on each side, too high for us to look out without standing up. It was crowded with people, apparently of all nations. There were plenty of beds and cradles, containing screaming and kicking babies. Every other man had a cigar or pipe in his mouth, and jugs of whiskey were handed round freely. The fumes of the whiskey and the dense tobacco smoke were sickening to my senses, and my mind was equally nauseated by the coarse jokes and ribald songs around me. It was a very disagreeable ride. Since that time there has been some improvement in these matters.
Few sources even discuss the early railroad segregation fights, and the ones that do usually cite
Frederick Douglass and 1841 as the start. Some cite
David Ruggles in the same year.
They're wrong -- another sources gives us this:
Before 1841, there were occasional references in the press of the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts] to instances of enforced segregation on the railroads.
We know better about the riots and violence than that text, which was published before the Montgomery boycott ended -- but that's a relatively small misdemeanor, considering how many civil rights timelines go "the Civil War, Reconstruction, Plessy, much unhappiness, and then Truman and Jackie Robinson!" Those timelines need to advance past the third grade already and get with the program, because black people have been fighting for mass transit equality since mass transit was around, near as I can tell. This stuff predates the first transcontinental railroad by a solid 30 years.
Another part of this stuff that predates the end of Alabama law requiring segregated travel is the part where Massachusetts "abolished segregated railroad seating in April 1843."
For perspective, the last slave ship from Africa arrived in 1859 in Georgia.
Part of why I really enjoy researching these diaries -- I've been working on this one for about three and a half hours now, and as I write, I get ideas and I hunt for sources and I find things like that cite on the putrescence of the Jim Crow car experience -- is that occasionally I find a story that makes my heart sing.
I present to you Louisville, Ky., whose white citizen tried like actual hell to relegate blacks to the backs of stagecoaches and trolleys and failed because ... well.
On October 30, 1870, three men outside the Quinn Chapel in Louisville, Ky., made their way toward the trolley stand at Tenth and Walnut on the Central Passenger line. When the trolley stopped, each climbed aboard the near-empty car, dropped a coin in the fare box and took a seat.
... [T]he trio's actions that day had been prearranged by Louisville's Black community to test the legality of the streetcar companies' segregation policies. Under the policies, Black women were allowed to ride the trolleys, but on some lines, they were forced to take seats in the rear of the car. Black men were usually only permitted to ride on the small front platform with the driver, and on some lines, they couldn't ride at all.
That legal test pops up later. But first, the three black passengers had to be jailed for disorderly conduct -- the order here being the social order of blacks knowing their place.
The passengers -- Horace Pearce and brothers Robert and Samuel Fox -- were tried and found guilty of creating a disturbance, which is to say that the white people who mobbed their trolley car were profoundly disturbed. Robert Fox sued the company for denial of access was sane.
Meanwhile, Louisville blacks boycotted the company all winter. That May, the district court not only rules for Fox, it awarded him $15.
Louisville was not quiiite ready to award Fox or any other black person anything but misery. Two days of violent protests and hilarity later -- the white trolley drivers would take the car off the tracks and sometimes they and the white passengers would leave them, so the blacks drove the cars -- white and black community leaders met:
Mayor John George Baxter Jr. sat down with leaders in the Black community and their lawyers, representatives from streetcar companies and the chief of police to negotiate a settlement. The companies' owners had grown nervous that prolonging the battle over their segregation policies would hurt profits. They also recognized that given the current political climate in the South, with the federal government stepping forward to advance and protect Blacks' rights, this was a fight that ultimately they couldn't win.
They agreed to give in to the protesters' demands. After a long struggle, Louisville's African American citizens had finally attained "simple justice": the right to ride the city's streetcars without restriction.
In 1870. And in 1877, President Hayes withdrew federal troops and those hard-fought equality gains sort of basically all went away.
Sort of basically all. A few remained. Among them:
Only in Louisville were African Americans successful in keeping Jim Crow off city streetcars. There, too, Whites repeatedly tried to resegregate the trolleys.
But Louisville's Black citizens fought the Jim Crow ordinances every time they were proposed and held onto their hard-won right to ride — even as segregation increasingly defined other aspects of city life.
From what I can tell, only two surprises remain. The first amazed me, and the second disappointed me as much, and it's about to disappoint you for a different reason.
Plessy was a test case. Several of you probably know that. But it was a test case that followed a successful court challenge to segregation laws in the South. And the law it focused on -- requiring separate cars on trains for blacks -- was opposed by business because of the cost.
On May 15, 1892, the Louisiana State Supreme Court decided in favor of the Pullman Company’s claim that the law was unconstitutional as it applied to interstate travel. Encouraged, the committee decided to press a test case on intrastate travel. With the cooperation of the East Louisiana Railroad, on June 7, 1892, Homer Plessy, a mulatto (7/8 white), seated himself in a white compartment, was challenged by the conductor, and was arrested and charged with violating the state law. In the Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans, Tourgée argued that the law requiring “separate but equal accommodations” was unconstitutional. When Judge John H. Ferguson ruled against him, Plessy applied to the State Supreme Court for a writ of prohibition and certiorari. Although the court upheld the state law, it granted Plessy’s petition for a writ of error that would enable him to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
In 1896, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Justice Henry Brown of Michigan delivered the majority opinion, which sustained the constitutionality of Louisiana’s Jim Crow law.
Raise your hand if you've ever heard of
Abbott v. Hicks, which found that Louisiana's segregated interstate transport law "does not apply to interstate passengers." (Yes, those lynching notes are supposed to hit your heart that hard. So succinct, yet so terrible.)
The other surprise is going to disappoint you because I'm going to put it in another diary. It's a longer story, involving research I haven't done yet -- I found Abbott about three minutes after I types "ever heard of," and I'm tired. But I will tell it on Saturday night or so, assuming those Underground Railroad love stories (not making that one up) don't occupy my eyes between now and then.