Gerald Ensley: Two dimes on a city bus brought cultural upheaval

(This column was first published in the Tallahassee Democrat on May 21, 2006.)

Fifty years ago Friday, two college students refused to sit in the back of a Tallahassee bus. Their seemingly innocuous gesture catapulted this small Southern city into turmoil and jump-started it toward equality for all.

As historian Glenda Rabby writes in "The Pain and the Promise," her comprehensive 1999 book about the local civil-rights movement: "Race relations in Tallahassee could never be the same."

The incident that begat the boycott began on a Saturday afternoon at a bus stop at South Adams and Canal streets (now FAMU Way). Three female Florida A&M University students boarded a crowded bus for downtown. All three paid their dime fares. One walked to the back of the bus, where Southern tradition held that Blacks sat. The city's contract with the bus company forbade Blacks and whites from sitting together.

But two of the students, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, sat beside a white woman on a three-person seat directly behind the driver. The white woman offered no protest. But driver Max Coggins ordered the Black women to the rear. They refused - but offered to disembark if their fares were refunded.

Coggins refused. He drove instead to a nearby service station and called police.

Jakes and Patterson were arrested and charged with placing themselves "in position to incite a riot." They were released to the custody of the FAMU dean of students and taken to their off-campus rooming house at 123 W. Jennings St. One night later, a cross was burned on their lawn and the girls were moved to a FAMU dorm for safety.

For the failure of a bus driver to refund 20 cents, our civil-rights movement began.

In 1956, Tallahassee was a typical Southern city - meaning racial segregation was strictly enforced. More than one-third of its 38,000 residents were Black. Most worked low-paying unskilled jobs as maids, construction workers and handymen. They lived in Blacks-only neighborhoods and attended Blacks-only schools. They could patronize white-owned businesses but had to observe long-standing restrictions such as sitting in theater balconies, buying only take-out food - and riding in the back of the bus.

But around the nation, black people were beginning to protest such inequalities. In 1953, the first bus boycott was staged in Baton Rouge. In 1955, Rosa Parks' refusal to move to the back of the bus ignited a boycott in Montgomery, Ala., led by Martin Luther King Jr. Before 1956 ended, there also would be bus boycotts or racial demonstrations in Atlanta, Miami, Tampa and Columbia, S.C.

The modern U.S. civil-rights movement was under way.

Tallahassee's bus boycott was started by FAMU students inflamed by the treatment of Jakes and Patterson. At a students-only meeting early Monday morning, 2,300 students voted to boycott the buses for the remainder of their term.

They poured into the street in front of Lee Hall, stopped the first bus that came through and demanded all Black passengers get off and join them in a boycott. (Roughly 80 percent of the city's bus passengers were Black.) Word spread.

The next day, the mantle of leadership passed to local residents. A group of Black ministers and business owners formed the Inter-Civic Council (ICC). For their chairman they chose the Rev. C.K. Steele, who had arrived from West Virginia only four years earlier to become pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church.

The ICC, modeled on King's Montgomery Improvement Association, became an important tool. Leadership in Tallahassee's Black community previously had relied on teachers, principals and FAMU administrators, all of whom depended on white officials for their jobs and thus were reluctant to support the bus boycott publicly. The ICC also gave legitimacy to local Black protest: Instead of bringing in the NAACP, with its reputation then as a radical organization, the ICC leadership muted charges by white Tallahasseeans that the boycott was led by "outside agitators."

Immediately, the ICC sent a nine-person committee to speak with City Manager Arvah Hopkins and Cities Transit bus company manager Charles Carter. The men dismissed their concerns about the treatment Blacks received on city buses. That night, 500 Black residents attended a meeting at Bethel Missionary Baptist Church and unanimously supported the boycott.

The crowd drafted three demands: Bus seating should be first-come, first-served; drivers should treat all customers courteously; and the bus company should hire Black drivers. Until those demands were met, said the ICC, Blacks would not ride city buses.

White leaders - including the editor of the Tallahassee Democrat, Malcolm Johnson - tried to defuse the boycott.

The arrests of Jakes and Patterson were turned over to FAMU officials, so Tallahassee could drop the charges and avoid becoming a legal test case (as Montgomery had become). Johnson assembled a biracial council to discuss ending the boycott, but the committee dissolved after one meeting when 14 ICC members showed up in opposition. The Tallahassee City Commission tried to broker a deal in closed session with 15 "friendly" black leaders, including legendary FAMU football coach Jake Gaither - an effort that earned contempt in the Black community.

On June 2, the City Commission admonished the bus company to enforce its policy of courtesy to all customers and urged it to hire Black drivers. But the commission refused to endorse integrated seating. It pointed to its contract with the bus company that prohibited Blacks and whites from sitting together.

Tallahassee's white leaders were convinced that integrating buses would lead to integrating schools - as ordered two years previously by the U.S. Supreme Court - and would lead to chaos in Southern society.

"It's very likely if the Negroes of the South would or could agree to stop . . . just short of integration of the public schools, they could go just about anywhere they wanted without hindrance of white people," Johnson wrote.

With almost unanimous support of the boycott by Black riders, the bus company's revenues fell precipitously. On June 12, the City Commission granted the bus company a 5-cent increase in fares. On July 1, the buses stopped running entirely. They resumed a month later and the bus company hired two Black drivers - though they drove only the "black routes."

The boycott emboldened Black leaders. The Rev. K.S. Dupont, ICC vice president, announced he'd be a candidate for City Commission in February 1957 - becoming the first Black person to run for office in Tallahassee since Reconstruction. His candidacy against avowed segregationist Davis Atkinson inspired the first of many voter-registration drives among Black residents.

To fill the transportation void, the ICC organized car pools. A 65-driver force chauffeured Black workers to and from their jobs. Police fought back with aggressive ticketing of car-pool drivers for real and imagined offenses: Steele was the first driver harassed when he received tickets for allegedly running a stop sign and speeding.

The City Commission threatened to pass an ordinance banning the carpools. Instead, the state Attorney General ruled the ICC carpools violated state laws regarding "for hire" transportation. And in September, 22 drivers including Steele were arrested.

City Judge John Rudd found all 22 drivers guilty - after some riders testified they had paid a fee. Rudd sentenced each defendant to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. He suspended the jail sentences. Steele paid the $11,000 in fines and spent five years making speeches at churches around the nation to replenish his bank account.

The convictions had the desired effect of ending the carpools - and ultimately the boycott. For a while, Blacks walked to their jobs. But on Dec. 23, as the lack of transportation became a major hardship, the ICC voted to end the boycott after seven months.

Yet the ICC continued to battle white opposition to integration.

On June 5, a federal court had struck down segregated bus seating in a lawsuit filed by the Montgomery bus boycotters. On Nov. 13, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling: It was now federal law that public transit should have integrated seating.

Despite the ruling and the ICC's vote to end the boycott, the Tallahassee City Commission refused to rescind its policy against integrated seating. So the ICC voted to ride the buses in a "non-segregated manner." On Christmas Eve, Steele and other ICC members rode in the "whites only" front sections of city buses. For several days, they repeated the front-sitting rides, one of which was photographed by Life magazine.

Bus manager Carter and nine drivers were arrested for allowing the "integrated" rides, and the City Commission suspended the bus company's franchise. The bus company announced it would sue the city to keep its franchise, and the ICC announced it would host a mass "integrated ride" demonstration.

The ICC canceled its plan when a menacing group of 200 white youths showed up at the terminal at Park Avenue and Monroe Street. But ICC leaders promised Blacks would continue to ride at the front of the buses.

On New Year's Eve, rocks were thrown through the windows of Steele's home next door to Bethel Baptist and gunshots were fired through the windows of a Boulevard Street grocery owned by Cornelius Speed, a cousin of ICC leader Dan Speed. On Jan. 3, a cross was burned on the lawn of Bethel Baptist.

A Democrat editorial blasted the burning cross as a "shameful device unbecoming any citizen of a free country." Gov. LeRoy Collins, a Tallahassee native, stepped in to head off further violence. On Jan. 1, he suspended the bus service, blaming both "irresponsible Negro leadership" and "rabid pro-segregationists" for the problems. He asked that a "wise and harmonious" solution be crafted.

On Jan. 7, the city offered its solution: assigned seating on the buses. It ordered bus drivers to assign seats to every rider, using "weight distribution," "health and safety" and the "peace, tranquility and good order" as criteria. Though the ordinance was designed to continue separating riders on the basis of race, it made no specific mention of segregation - and city commissioners acknowledged the "doubtful legality" of its previous segregation requirement for the bus company.

The plan satisfied Gov. Collins, who lifted his suspension Jan. 12. The buses were only half full; many Blacks continued an unofficial boycott. And the ICC tried a different tack to challenge bus segregation.

On Jan. 19, three Black FAMU students and three white FSU students boarded a bus and took their assigned seats. Then one white student and two Black students changed their seats so all six were sitting as interracial pairs. The driver told the three men to return to their assigned seats. When they refused, they were arrested.

Judge Rudd found all three guilty and sentenced them to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine. But the handwriting was on the wall: Tallahassee was fighting a battle for segregation it would not win.

Under urging from a Collins-appointed biracial committee, the city allowed the bus company gradually to rescind the assigned seating. Blacks began returning to the buses and, though apparently no official pronouncement was made, city and bus officials eventually quit enforcing the seat assignment plan.

On Feb. 26, 1957, Dupont lost his bid for the City Commission to Atkinson, 6,804 to 2,405. But only 2,318 blacks had voted - none of them for Atkinson - which meant Dupont had received 87 votes from whites.

On May 26, 1957, the ICC celebrated the first anniversary of the bus boycott with a weeklong series of events, which included a speech by King.

The seat-assignment ordinance, which allowed de facto segregation, apparently was never specifically repealed. But it was considered wiped from the books when the private bus company was sold to the city in 1973.

Today, the Tallahassee mayor, city manager and police chief are Black, and more than two dozen Blacks have been elected to office in Leon County. Today, 70% of the city's more than 130 bus drivers are minorities.

And riders sit wherever they wish.

Gerald Ensley was a reporter and columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat from 1980 until his retirement in 2015. He died in 2018 following a stroke. The Tallahassee Democrat is publishing columns capturing Tallahassee’s history from Ensley’s vast archives each Sunday through 2024 in the Opinion section as part of theTLH 200: Gerald Ensley Memorial Bicentennial Project.

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Gerald Ensley: Two dimes on a city bus brought cultural upheaval