DN17

A Jim Crow Bus & the Weight of Tradition

March 20, 1945

A young white man of about 28 boarded a Gentilly Bus No. 1558 on the morning of March 20, 1946; he was dressed in khaki dungarees and a loose hanging sweater. He wore no hat or cap and his dark brown hair had been tangled a bit by the spring winds. His complexion was slightly dark, but there was no doubt that he was white. He did not stop when his companion stopped in the aisle in the white section of the bus, but made his way parallel to the rear side door and there stood in a  hip-shortened resting position with his hands on the back of a seat in which sat a single occupant--a young Negro girl in her teens. 

Two Negro screen-pushers, a single Negro in a second seat, an empty seat -- all cross-seats -- made up the ensemble. There  were also other empty seats in the colored section here and there. The Negroes -- who had been crowded and standing in the  white section ten blocks before -- were now in possession of most of the empty seats.

The white man, seeing that the Negroes made no move to relinquish their seats and take ones further back in the bus,  suddenly became imbued with a very brilliant idea, and smilingly took the screen from the right side of the bus--where the Negro girl was sitting--and placed it on the back of the empty seat behind the Negroes and still smiling, sat down behind them.  To heighten the humor of the situation, he had turned the wording on the seat "For Colored Patrons Only" towards the front of the vehicle. The Negro men were thus sandwiched in with him between two signs which read similarly. To move either way would be to disregard the captions on the signs before and after them. This arrangement left the little Negro girl on the right and all of the Negroes on the side of the bus without any signs of segregation, and the white man had thus by his actions "emancipated" them to the status of the whites.

A white woman, boarding the bus sometimes after this had taken place, looked at the muddled situation and unable to arrive at any reasonable conclusion, decided that it was best to stand. At last reports the white man was still sitting behind the two Negro men, the three of them shut off from the rest of the passengers by the screens in the front and back. The Negro passengers in the rear, seeing the ludicrous situation, had begun to nudge each other. Ill-concealed chuckles went down the aisle like an irresistible snowball. The bus driver, sitting in the front, collecting fares and discharging passengers, was oblivious to all that had taken place.

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