The Tallahassee bus boycott was a citywide boycott in
Tallahassee, Florida
Tallahassee ( ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Florida. It is the county seat and only incorporated municipality in Leon County, Florida, Leon County. Tallahassee became the capital of Florida, then the Florida Territory, in 1824. In ...
that sought to end racial segregation in the employment and seating arrangements of city buses. On May 26, 1956, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, two
Florida A&M University
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU), commonly known as Florida A&M, is a public historically black land-grant university in Tallahassee, Florida. Founded in 1887, It is the third largest historically black university in the U ...
students, were arrested by the Tallahassee Police Department for "placing themselves in a position to incite a riot". Robert Saunders, representing the
NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E.&nb ...
, and Rev.
C. K. Steele began talks with city authorities while the local African-American community started boycotting the city's buses. The Inter-Civic Council ended the boycott on December 22, 1956.
On January 7, 1957, the City Commission repealed the bus-franchise
segregation Segregation may refer to:
Separation of people
* Geographical segregation, rates of two or more populations which are not homogenous throughout a defined space
* School segregation
* Housing segregation
* Racial segregation, separation of humans ...
clause because of the United States Supreme Court ruling ''
Browder v. Gayle
''Browder v. Gayle'', 142 F. Supp. 707 (1956),[''Browder v. Gayle''](_blank)
14 ...
'' (1956).
History
Not only were buses segregated, with white riders at the front and black ones in the back, if there were no free black seats black riders had to stand, even if there were free white seats. Furthermore, if there were more white riders than white seats, black riders had to surrender their seats.
Jakes and Patterson boarded a city bus and sat in the only open seats, which were next to a white woman. The driver declared that the two women could not sit where they were sitting, and Jakes agreed to get off the bus if she received her bus fare in return. The driver would not return Jakes' bus fare and drove to a service station, where he then called the police, who subsequently arrested the women. Later that day, the students were bailed out by the Dean of Students.
The day after the incident, the
Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and ...
burned a cross in front of the women's residence.
[ News of the cross-burning quickly spread throughout the campus, and Student Government Association officers, led by Brodes Hartley, called for a meeting of the student body. The incidents (the cross-burning and the arrest) were discussed in the meeting. Student leaders called for the withdrawal of student support of the bus company and for students to seek participation in the boycott throughout the community. Reverend Steele, a member of the Tallahassee Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance (IMA) and leader in the NAACP, organized a mass meeting that night. In the meeting, the Inter-Civic Council (ICC) was born from the joining of the NAACP, IMA, and Tallahassee Civic League. The ICC was formed in response to community fear that a NAACP-led protest would be met with state repression. Its leaders held weekly meetings and the Council was highly active in Civil Rights-related activism. The NAACP became involved well after the boycott had been started, when leaders sent a lawyer to defend drivers of boycotters (carpool drivers) who were arrested for driving unlicensed "for hire" vehicles.]
Three months into the boycott, the demand for the employment of black bus drivers was met. For months after ''Browder v. Gayle'', the government upheld ''de facto'' segregation, with the instantiation of an ordinance mandating assigned seats on buses. That led to arrests of blacks who did not sit in the seats assigned to them. Efforts persisted in resisting bus segregation and enforcement of the ordinance became less strict, when blacks again rode the buses.
In 1959, members of the Tallahassee InterCivic Council tested the success of the boycott by riding the newly-integrated buses; they found that the integration was successful.
Sociologist Lewis Killian points out that organizational and community leaders did not gather until after the initiation of the boycott, which highlights the spontaneity of the student-initiated boycott. Furthermore, the boycott was initiated during a time in which Tallahassee's civil rights-related organizational activity was markedly low and the black community in Tallahassee was unprepared for a protest as large as the boycott.
The creation of the ICC provides an example of the emergence of new norms and structures. Although it is widely believed that the centers of Civil Rights Movement activity were organizational and structural bodies such as the black church and the NAACP, a new normative structure emerged in the Tallahassee Bus Boycott.
The boycott presents an overlooked departure from the circumstances of the Montgomery bus boycott
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States ...
, which was planned and precipitated by active individuals and organizations; in addition, the Tallahassee boycott, at least in its initial stages, was separate from and did not model the latter.
Killian finds the formation of the ICC and the spontaneous and irregular nature of the boycott's initiation commensurate with traditional collective behavior
The expression collective behavior was first used by Franklin Henry Giddings and employed later by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, Herbert Blumer, Ralph H. Turner and Lewis Killian, and Neil Smelser to refer to social processes and events w ...
theory, which includes such superficially irrational elements as spontaneity.
See also
* History of Tallahassee, Florida ยง Black history
References
Further reading
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External links
The Tallahassee Bus Boycott Begins (May 1956)
- Provided by Florida Memory.
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{{Civil rights movement
1956 protests
1957 protests
1956 in Florida
1957 in Florida
1956 in the United States
1957 in the United States
1956 in transport
1957 in transport
African-American history of Florida
Boycotts of organizations
Bus transportation in Florida
Civil rights protests in the United States
History of African-American civil rights
Bus Boycott
Transportation in Tallahassee, Florida
May 1956 events in the United States
History of racism in Florida