Policing Passengers

Black Women and the Fight Against Bus Violence

Before the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Rides, Black women passengers founded bus protest and made the right to a bus seat a symbol of the right to American democracy. Traveling back to the beginning of the bus industry in the 1920s, Policing Passengers tells the hidden history of this first generation of riders in the Jim Crow North and the Jim Crow South. In response to the perceived threat of Black women’s mobility, white bus executives recruited drivers from law enforcement and implemented surveillance policies to violently police these riders.

But Black women passengers resisted the bus industry’s policing. They narrated their experiences to the Black press, wrote blistering letters to bus companies, notarized affidavits, and pressed the government to investigate. During the Great Migration and World War II, at least forty-three Black women passengers sued for segregation and bodily injury. Their lawsuits culminated in the 1946 Supreme Court decision that enforcing segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional, Morgan v. Virginia. Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy’s innovative and meticulously researched book reveals that Black women passengers' activism transformed the bus industry and drafted the blueprints for the postwar Black freedom struggle.

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