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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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