New York City Building a historic social movement, the Bus Riders Union is offering a re-newed Left a progressive alternative to the Right-wing drift. Virtually every day, teams of BRU/SDP organizers board the buses and organize. There are certainly many issues around which radical movements might today be built—a renewed labor movement, environmental justice, racial justice, immigrant rights, or the feminization of poverty. Public transportation is a site for struggle that literally touches all of these—a lesson Strategy Center organizers understand well. Eric Mann, Rita Burgos, Martín Hernandez, Kikanza Ramsey, Chris Mathis, and others have consistently made connections between civil rights, environmental justice, labor struggles, privatization, and the problems of capitalism. These organizers see their consti-tuency in all of its dimensions—as workers, low-income consumers, people of color, women, and city dwellers tired of toxic living. The Bus Riders Union's demands—2,000 new buses to double the MTA bus fleet, a moratorium on funding an overpriced rail system, a radical reduction in the bus fare from $1.60 to $1.00 and eventually to 50 cents, better service and safety, zero-emission buses, and the manufacture of MTA buses in Los Angeles to create jobs in inner-city communities—outline a remedy for past discrimination that genuinely reflects the broad range of issues encompassed by their expanded approach to transportation organizing. Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union v. MTA is bound to be a landmark case: If won, its challenge to a separate and unequal transportation system in Los Angeles may match that of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. But win or lose, this civil rights battle that is organizing new working-class constituencies in Los Angeles marks a new high in a long history of working people of color, particularly African Americans, seizing the public space of transportation—buses, trolleys, city streets—as a physical and political terrain for acts of resistance to racist practices. Together with the elected BRU/SDP leaders—Della Bonner, Ricardo Zelada, Scott Miller, Rosalio Mendiola, Rudy Pisani, and Woodrow Coleman—Strategy Center organizers are heirs to a long and noble tradition: Since the 19th century, buses, streetcars, trains, and other forms of public transportation have been among the most important arenas of race and class conflict in the United States. Black Resistance on the Buses Well over a century before Rosa Parks took her stand in Montgomery, Alabama—indeed, while slavery still gripped this country—free black citizens constantly challenged segregation laws (commonly referred to as the "Jim Crow" system) on the nation's burgeoning urban transportation systems. In Louisiana in 1833, the efforts of a dozen African Americans to board a "whites only" railroad car culminated in violence after a white mob physically attacked the would-be passengers. The fighting came to an abrupt end when several of the black men in the group pulled out guns and started firing on their attackers in self-defense. When the smoke cleared, the African Americans ended up in jail and the segregation ordinance remained entrenched. In New York City in this same period, African Americans were either denied access to the horse-driven streetcars or restricted to the outside platform. Skirmishes over access to space took place regularly, especially during the 1850s—the decade in which the Supreme Court decided in the Dred Scott Case that escaped slaves residing outside the South were not citizens of this country. It was during this period of intense anti-black racism, however, that a black school teacher by the name of Elizabeth Jennings and the great abolitionist and scholar J.W.C. Pennington sued the city's streetcar company for being forcibly removed from the white section of a car. They won the lawsuit, securing access to public transportation for all African Americans. Their challenges to Jim Crow laws on public transportation were followed up by a parade of black women political activists, including feminist/abolitionist Sojourner Truth and militant journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who seized the terrain to demonstrate acts of resistance and to organize. At the dawn of the 20th century, when W.E.B. DuBois declared that the "problem of the color line" was the fundamental problem facing America and the rest of the world, black activists throughout Southern cities waged a massive boycott campaign against Jim Crow streetcars. From Richmond to New Orleans between 1900 and 1906, black passengers sought to stay off the streetcars to protest segregation ordinances that had just been passed by municipal and state lawmakers. While transportation segregation had existed before Jim Crow laws were actually codified, the passage of this legislation reflected a more systematic strategy to disenfranchise and disempower black communities in the South. Again, streetcars were the most tangible site of struggle. Blackowned transportation companies emerged to offer black people an alternative to white racist ones, but they died out quickly. Through violence, intimidation, and an array of legal loopholes, the New South city fathers succeeded in eliminating black competition and breaking the back of the boycott. The new laws were not only an affront to black passengers, but they literally turned streetcar conductors into armed police officers. Throughout the South, buses, streetcars, and trains became moving "theaters" for contestation. By theater, I mean both a war zone and stage where daily battles over public space are acted out by a captured, fare-paying clientele. As historian John Dittmer pointed out about streetcars in early 20th century Georgia, "violence, even death, resulted from feuds over territorial prerogatives." In Birmingham, Alabama, all bus drivers and street car conductors carried guns and blackjacks, and used them regularly to maintain (the social) order. As one Birmingham resident recalls, during the 1940s streetcar conductors "were just like policeman. They carried guns too." And they policed the aisles with a vengeance. Even the mildest act of resistance, from talking loud to arguing over change, could lead to ejection without a fare refund or, in some cases, arrest. Profanity or fighting could result in a six-month jail sentence or, in most cases, a substantial fine and court costs. Unlike the popularized image of Rosa Parks's quiet resistance (the quality that landed the local NAACP leader her symbolic part in making history), individual black protests (particularly by women) tended to be intentionally profane and militant. In Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1940s there were dozens of episodes of black women sitting in the white section, arguing with drivers or conductors, and fighting with white passengers. In most cases the final "act" of the drama showcased the woman either being ejected, receiving a refund for her fare and leaving on her own accord, moving to the back of the vehicle, or being arrested and sent to jail. Indeed, throughout the war, dozens of black women were arrested for merely cursing at the operator or a white passenger. In October of 1943, teenager Pauline Carth attempted to board the College Hills line around 8:00 PM. When she was informed that there was no more room for "colored" passengers, she forced her way into the bus anyway, threw her money at the driver, cursed, and spit at him. The driver responded by knocking her out of the bus, throwing her to the ground, and holding her down until police arrived. Fights between black women and white passengers were also fairly common. In March of 1943, a black woman and a white man boarding the East Lake-West End Line apparently got into a shoving match, which angered the black woman to the point where she "cursed him all the way to Woodlawn." When they reached Woodlawn she was arrested, sentenced to 30 days in jail, and had to pay a $50 fine. As a theater "stage" upon which race, class, and gender conflicts were played out, passengers who never joined a social movement or resisted Jim Crow themselves couldn't help but be affected by what they witnessed. The design of streetcars and buses themselves—enclosed spaces with seats facing forward or towards the center aisle—rendered everyday challenges to segregation unavoidable. Besides, stories of resistance and repression always circulated as lore in aggrieved communities, giving folks a collective sense of history that would inform social movements. Jo Ann Robinson, leader of the Black Women's Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama, and early architect of the bus boycott there recalled: "Almost daily some black man, woman, or child had had an unpleasant experience on the bus and told other members of the family about it at the supper table or around the open fireplace or stove. These stories were repeated to neighbors, who retold them in club meetings or to the ministers of large church congregations." The struggle over public transportation, in other words, was not simply to achieve mixed-race seating. The most intense battles were fought over the manner in which African Americans were treated by operators and other passengers; the power of drivers to allocate or limit space for black passengers; the verbal and physical violence black passengers were forced to endure; and the racist practice of forcing blacks to pay at the front door, exit, and re-enter through the rear doors. It was not uncommon, for example, for half-empty buses or streetcars to pass up African Americans on the pretext that space needed to be preserved for "potential" white riders. Nor was it unusual for a black passenger to pay at the front of the bus and be left standing as s/he deboarded to enter the rear door. Other sources of frustration were the all-too-common cases of black passengers who had been cheated out of their fare or shortchanged. Some unscrupulous drivers and conductors made extra money by returning short change, presuming that black working people could not count. Because daytoday treatment was so important to black passengers, most movements that sought to desegregate public transportation also demanded that companies hire black bus drivers. Thus, once Rosa Parks's act of resistance was chosen as the one to magnify and the celebrated Montgomery bus boycott got underway on December 5, 1955, it was clear from the demands initiated by the Women's Political Council (WPC) and the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) that sitting at the front of the bus was not the central issue, despite the popular media's version of the story. Key issues included the right to pay and board through the front door, more bus stops in black neighborhoods, more seats reserved for black riders, and an immediate end to discourteous treatment meted out to African Americans. Under the leadership of Jo Ann Robinson (WPC); Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and leader of the MIA; E.D. Nixon, a veteran labor organizer for the first major black trade union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and many, many others, a social movement was born that would fundamentally alter the nature of black protest in the U.S. For 13 months the black community of Montgomery held mass meetings, car pooled, placed church buses in the service of black employees, and did everything they could to stay off the buses. The movement not only succeeded in securing more space for themselves, they struck down the segregation ordinance that limited black access in the first place. More importantly, as public transportation again proved to be a central arena of struggle, it spurred other movements across the country, serving as a catalyst for growth of the modern Civil Rights movement. The BRU/SDP Strategy: Focus on the Working Class of Color Like much of the Civil Rights movement during its formative stages, however, the fight against Jim Crow buses was more successful in challenging physical apartheid than in challenging the economic underpinnings of structural racism. Although the Civil Rights movement succeeded in desegregating public space, winning the franchise, securing federal job anti-discrimination legislation, and eventually paving the way for the increase in black elected officials, neither the vote nor legislative initiatives were effective weapons against poverty, joblessness, plant shutdowns, and transnational capital's growing structural imposition of a low-wage, high-unemployment lean and mean society. Moreover, not all black elected officials have turned out to be sympathetic to working people. Thus, in some respects the Bus Riders Union represents a completely new, class-based challenge to racial inequality in public transportation. As Strategy Center director Eric Mann argues, "The first wave of the Civil Rights movement benefited all African Americans, breaking down the most egregious legal forms of overt racism and, in some ways, allowing a greater class stratification and class differentiation among black people—a 'democratic right' under capitalism. It should not really be surprising that 30 years later, a group of 350,000 working people, 81 percent of whom are people of color, would bring civil rights charges against 13 elected members of the MTA representing ruling-class interests, 5 of whom are people of color, as well as a black CEO who was the original primary named defendant. The growing struggle of the working class, overwhelmingly low-income, female, and of color, against a primarily white but increasingly racially 'integrated' transnational ruling class is the new terrain for class, race, and gender struggle. The Strategy Center and BRU/SDP civil rights lawsuit, rather than substituting class for race, reflects the growing integration of class and race concerns for low-income people of color." Fighting Transit Apartheid: South African Lessons Whereas the BRU/SDP clearly builds on the previous generations of activism in black communities in the U.S., their work shares even more in common with the South African bus-boycott movements during the 1940s and 1950s where conjoined race and class oppression defined the terms for a politically-Left-inspired social movement of a black working-class, on the contested terrain of transportation. In Alexandra, a poor township quite a bit outside of Johannesburg, a coalition representing the African National Congress, progressive trade unionists, the Workers' and Tenants' Leagues, Communists, and other assorted radicals and even white liberals, organized several successful boycotts to protest fare increases. Although rising fares were the primary issue (transportation was often the second major expense in the family budget), Alexandra's black commuters acted out their resistance to overcrowding, inaccessibility, unsheltered terminals, and discourteous treatment from drivers. For many boycott supporters, the struggle in Alexandra was not just about bus fare or better service; it focused the lens in the very eye of the storm known as class struggle. During the 1957 boycotts, coalition activists in Alexandra and Evaton organized sympathy boycotts in several other townships, "stay at home" campaigns (essentially general strikes), massive demonstrations, and institutions for building the larger movement. The Alexandra Peoples Transport Committee (APTC) attracted 2,000 people to mass meetings and convinced 15,000 people to walk nine miles to Johannesburg. Once the boycott spread to Sophiatown and Pretoria townships, about 60,000 people stopped using Public Utility Transit Company (PUTCO) buses. PUTCO responded by withdrawing all of their buses and the state vowed not to allow any bus companies to operate in Alexandra. Progressive leaders in APTC threatened a general strike if the city council did not provide transportation to workers, thus linking consumer demands to the trade union movement. Before the strike could take place, however, APTC negotiated a settlement that most of its supporters opposed, creating enormous confusion that left Alexandra's bus riders demoralized and, to a certain extent, defeated. Nevertheless, in spite of the breakdown in leadership, the boycott revealed the potential power of the "labor/community" movement. In Alexandra, ANC membership during the boycott grew from 600 to 6,000, making it one of the largest branches in the country. The South African Congress of Trade Unions used the opportunity of the boycott to demand a minimum wage of one pound a day, which deeply politicized African workers and ensured the success of the stay-at-home campaigns. In the short run, the bus boycott movement could not sustain momentum in the face of powerful white-owned transit companies and the internal contradictions of the movement. But in the long run, they prompted several industry-wide strikes, two major stay-at-home campaigns, wage increases, and a nationalist movement with renewed faith in working-class radicalism. It is this working-class radicalism that fuels the Labor/Community Strategy Center and its union of working-class transportation consumers—the Bus Riders Union, which, using named plaintiff Ricardo Zelada's words, charges that "wage slavery and racism come together when, because of their race, the working poor are obliged to work under the worst of conditions. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the same people who use the bus are both poor workers and racial and ethnic minorities—that's where racism and the proletarian character of our 'class' of bus riders come together." The Bus Riders Union has assessed several pre-trial offers by the MTA to "settle" the class action civil rights lawsuit in return for calling off the trial—with some at the MTA implying that, if the BRU/SDP loses its case, even the most minimal of proposed bus improvements will be taken off the table. As BRU/SDP leader Della Bonner observed, "We have an obligation to future generations to not only fight for improved bus service and remedies to past discrimination, but to document the MTA's systematic design of a two-tiered separate and unequal transportation system. For me, that's what it means to make history. We want to make sure our movement is part of the historical record." It is in this rare U.S. context of a self-conscious social movement that the contribution of partisan, committed historians can be maximized, and the cry "make history" can be best understood.
ROBIN D.G. KELLEY is author of Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (The Free Press, 1994) and Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990), both available in English from Strategy Center Publications. Es Profesor de Historia y Estudios Africanos en New York University.
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