Professor Skirt, MLK Special: Why the Bus?

Professor Skirt is an occasional series in which I use my doctoral training for something other than amusing friends and family. New research and timely excerpts from past work. Get yer learn on.

Because it's MLK day and because I spent the better part of four years examining the role of the urban bus in American culture, I thought I'd share some thoughts on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the movement that propelled King to the national stage in 1956. Although it's not about King. It's about the buses.

Most of what's below is excerpted from the first chapter of my dear departed beloved dissertation; the italicized portions are me, today. 

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In March 1956, Lee Burnside sent a letter to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser to encourage white people in his city and throughout the South to donate one dollar per person to the bus franchise in his city, Montgomery City Lines. A for-profit business, Montgomery City Lines had suffered severe financial losses due to the protest movement that had inspired most black people in Montgomery to avoid riding the buses since the previous December. It was rumored that the parent company, National City Lines in Chicago, was considering termination of bus service in Montgomery after having lost over two hundred thousand dollars over the course of three months, with further losses projected for the duration of the protest. Mr. Burnside, however, was not concerned about the company’s balance sheet. He had much graver concerns. In his letter, he states that he is creating a program he calls Bucks for Buses and the Protection of the White Race.

For Burnside and thousands of other segregationist whites in Montgomery and throughout the South, the city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, had come to symbolize a great deal more than transportation. For 381 days, most of Montgomery’s black residents refused to ride the city’s buses in what historians and journalists most often refer to as the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Citing the verbal and physical abuse they or their friends and family had experienced at the hands of bus drivers and white passengers, the protesters demanded the hiring of black drivers for routes in black neighborhoods, a standard of courtesy from all drivers, and a first-come, first-served seating plan that would seat whites from the front and blacks from the rear. Although ridership in 1955 was only twenty-five percent white and most middle- and upper-class whites had quit riding the bus permanently in favor of private automobiles, the reaction in Montgomery’s white community was fierce. No longer merely an inferior form of urban transportation, the buses in Montgomery seemed to be carrying the future of the white race.

 

On the other side of town, the black workers and shoppers who crowded the sidewalks and rode in carpools saw something similarly momentous in the looming bodies of passing buses. For them, the buses were sites of oppression; avoiding them was a way to evade abuse and to peacefully, non-violently demand just treatment in the future. Over several months, however, what began as an attempt by the city’s black population to modify seating procedures and secure better treatment had transformed the commonplace municipal bus into a symbol for the hopes and fears of an entire city.

[The big question--the one that inspired my entire dissertation, in fact--is this: Why the bus? What was it about the bus that made it both possible and meaningful to maintain a protest this long and garner so much national attention? Despite a deep and broad historiography of the movement, the bus itself has gone unrecognized for its silent but fundamental role in the longevity and impact of the protest. The longer story covers several reasons why the bus was so important, but I'll just share my favorite one: the bus itself--its internal configuration and the way people moved within it--both engendered conflict and provided an opportunity for black resistance. Read on...]

The unique seating system in Montgomery was one factor in its reputation for particularly intense racial conflict between bus passengers. Among southern bus systems, only Montgomery's hosted a pattern of renegotiation amongst the passengers, and between passengers and drivers: of thirty-six seats, the front ten seats were reserved for whites only, but if a bus filled to capacity, bus drivers or white passengers could force blacks of all ages and genders to stand. Describing the seating arrangements, Reverend Robert E. Hughes, a white Methodist minister in Montgomery in 1956, explained, “I do not think there is actually any clear line, except what exists in the mind of the individual driver.^" Without a firm line to reference in ascertaining the validity of requests for blacks to stand or move seats, efforts to negotiate seating frequently resulted violent conflicts on the city’s buses in the years leading up to the protest in 1955. For black Montgomery residents traveling under this unstable system, to ride the bus was to risk abuse, including ejection, becoming the victim of verbal assault, receiving incorrect change, not being given change at all, being left on the street when trying to board at the rear door, and taking beatings from bus drivers and white passengers. Responding to this pattern of abuse, one Montgomery citizen angrily referred to the city’s buses as “yellow rolling cell blocks.” 

The physical arrangement of the bus interior, to a greater extent than the interracial spaces in stores, elevators, planes, or trains, only exacerbated the racial tension that arose over seating negotiations. The buses in Montgomery seated thirty-six passengers, mostly in pairs on narrow seats, with a long four-seater bench at the rear. Two rows of lights illuminated the interior, one row on each side of the ceiling, and metal bars suspended from the ceiling provided stability for standing passengers. Sliding glass windows lined both sides of the bus body and a pair of sealed windows provided a view from the rear.  Bus drivers faced forward, toward the road and away from the passengers; all white men at the time of the protest, they were able to stop the bus to deal with “trouble” passengers, or to tacitly ignore abuses and continue driving. Most bus drivers were armed, endowed with police power to make arrests and use force if necessary.              

Passengers in this confining, monitored space had few options for situating their bodies and their belongings, constrained by the narrow center aisle, low ceilings, and small seats. Limited physical space required the sharing of personal space between black and white passengers on buses, even when segregated by race into different areas of the bus: moving past one another while boarding or waiting in line to board and pay the fare, for example. When the bus was full, blacks often stood over seated whites, creating a close arrangement of black waists at white eye-level. Black and white riders in Southern cities were forced to engage with one another, to negotiate the unnatural familiarity with fellow passengers generated by a palpable awareness of the physical closeness of bodies.

This close, ambiguous arrangement of black and white bodies was rare in Southern public spaces, where racial etiquette or legal restrictions often prescribed clearer rules for bodily organization. Without the security provided by a firm dividing line, white and black passengers were forced to negotiate seating arrangements for themselves through a series of individual confrontations, often in situations where blacks vastly outnumbered whites. When black passengers intentionally or ostensibly showed disrespect — by refusing to move, standing too close, or talking back — outnumbered white passengers often resorted to amplified displays of white superiority, including physical and verbal abuse, in an effort to reinstate the white control of the space around them.

Furthermore, the threat of black sexuality loomed in the bodies of black men standing over white women on the city’s most popular bus routes. Physical contact between black men and white women was unavoidable as buses turned corners, stopped, and accelerated. Intentional or not, these gendered and racialized interactions frequently inspired violent retaliation against the offending black man. “None of the threatened possibilities disturbs Southerners more than the prospect of a Negro man taking a seat beside a white woman,” a writer for the Associated Negro Press declared in 1956. “This sensitive spot in race relations is generally acknowledged to be the most likely to create strife and tension, or to erupt suddenly in riots or bloodshed.” Eight months into the boycott, fearing the potential end of segregation on buses, Alabama State Representative Nick Hare sponsored a bill, which ultimately failed to pass, that addressed this anxiety by giving white women the right to occupy an entire seat on Alabama’s intracity buses should they choose to sit alone. The fear of such “blackening” contact was so great as to obscure the realities of bus ridership, which was populated primarily by black women. Black men, wary of the increased frequency of arrest and abuse, had started avoiding the buses in ever-greater numbers following the Brown decision in 1954.

The uniquely ambiguous physical space of the bus, with its murky racial lines and large black ridership, engendered racial conflict in part because it also provided an effective site of resistance in which black passengers could react against abuse and domination. In general, according to American Studies scholar Nicole Fleetwood, buses are sites where closeness and anonymity combine to contribute to daring behavior, “a uniquely enclosed setting from which it is impossible to remove oneself while in motion…an ideal stage, framed by the physical limits of the vehicle, for performing and contesting social norms in the presence of others.” Rarely were introductions offered between passengers, and blacks and whites in Montgomery knew very little of each other socially. While the resulting sense of anonymity empowered white passengers to act maliciously without fear of punishment, it also encouraged black passengers to resist unfair treatment. Robin D.G. Kelley, writing about similar episodes of racial conflict on buses in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1940s, describes them as “moving theaters,” in both senses of the word: “a site of performance and…a site of military conflict.” 

Whereas most of Montgomery’s working class black population did not normally participate in organized protest for fear of violence or economic reprisals, on they bus they could perform acts of resistance, such as speaking loudly against segregation, abuse, or white domination, in well-lit, populated bus spaces full of potential allies and witnesses. Despite the segregation of seats, voices and noises carried throughout the bus, crossing over the provisional race barrier and creating both a reminder of the contested state of public space on the bus, and a disturbance of private personal space for those who might otherwise ignore the performance. On the bus, there was little escape from abuse, and no way to look past acts of resistance, until the bus pulled over and stopped.

There is, of course, more. So much more. Like, thirty pages more. But thank you for reading. And if you're looking for sources since blogger doesn't do footnotes, feel free to ask.