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Streetcar and Bus Boycotts

Streetcar boycotts in the early 1900s and bus boycotts in the 1950s were significant acts of consumer protest by urban blacks. The boycotters wanted equal access to city services, and this meant overturning the Jim Crow laws of their times, laws that insisted that blacks go to the “back of the bus” (or trolley). The streetcar boycotts failed to overturn the Jim Crow laws, but the bus boycotts did lead to changes in local laws in Baton Rouge and may have been helpful in influencing the 1956 federal court ruling that found bus segregation to be illegal.

The Streetcar Boycotts

These boycotts by black consumers occurred, according to historians August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, in more than 25 Southern cities from 1900 to 1906. The boycotts took place at a time of increasing hostility on the part of Southern whites and indifference on the part of Northern whites, a dual circumstance that may have encouraged acceptance of subservience as the prevailing attitude of Southern blacks.

The boycotts were initiated in response to Jim Crow streetcar laws enacted as part of the wave of segregation legislation passed in Southern states at the turn of the century. Meier and Rudwick note that the streetcar companies generally opposed the Jim Crow laws. The companies were concerned about the expense and difficulty of enforcing the laws, and they feared a loss of black customers, who often constituted a majority of local riders.

Although technically the new segregation laws represented an abridgment of the consumer right to choose, in that blacks were required to sit in the back of the streetcar, symbolically they represented much more—unjust acts whose effect was to disgrace blacks. Many blacks refused to ride on the streetcars when boycotts were called in their cities. Moreover, every state of the old Confederacy was affected and the connection between the segregation laws and the boycotts was apparent to all. Although some of the boycotts lasted for several weeks, others extended for much longer periods, with one in Augusta, Georgia continuing for 3 years. But the boycotts were unable to reverse the legal tide of segregation in the South. As the only protest mechanism realistically available to blacks, however, the boycott tactic continued to be embraced even though failure was inevitable.

The Bus Boycotts

Some 50 years later, blacks in the South once again vented their frustrations relating to the problems they experienced with urban public transportation, only this time buses rather than streetcars were the focus. The bus boycotts were of historic importance. As Aldon Morris has noted, the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century, with its direct action component, was an outgrowth of the bus boycott campaigns. These campaigns brought major disruptions to such state capitals as Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Montgomery, Alabama.

Looking first at Baton Rouge, we find that in June 1953, the city's black community initiated a boycott against the Jim Crow bus system. The boycott was led by the Reverend T. J. Jemison, pastor of one of Baton Rouge's largest black churches. As a church leader Jemison had close ties to the black masses and to the city's black clergymen, and these two linkages gave the boycott its strength.

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