From todays Stateman. Thought it was a nice photo related to this thread.
Mass transit in Austin at the beginning of the 20th century consisted mainly of streetcars, such as this one on Sixth Street.
Trolley boycott gave Austin's blacks a voice
Public transportation protests persisted throughout civil rights movement.
By Katie Humphrey
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, January 21, 2008
More than 50 years before Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery bus boycotts that would propel him to the forefront of the national civil rights movement, African Americans in Austin banded together to take on the city's transportation system in a relatively unknown chapter of local history.
It was March 1906, long before buses. Back then, streetcars on rails powered by overhead electric lines were the typical mode of mass transit. The Austin boycott, like those in other Southern cities, was spurred by turn-of-the-century segregation laws and emphasized the importance of public transportation as a battleground throughout the civil rights movement.
Little record remains of the boycott, but newspapers reported that it lasted about three months. It drew early concern from Austin Electric Railway officials, who feared losing money, and quickly grabbed the attention of politicians, media and the community as a whole. It achieved nearly total participation but ultimately failed to reverse the new segregated-car ordinance before African Americans started riding again.
"It was sort of ... like the precursor of what would blossom into the civil rights movement locally," said Karen Riles, a neighborhood liaison with the Austin History Center.
The boycott came on the heels of an ordinance passed by the City Council that required each streetcar to be divided into separate compartments and clearly indicate who was allowed to sit where. Riders who violated the ordinance could be convicted of a misdemeanor and fined $10 to $100.
Previously, the streetcars were not divided, and riders could sit wherever they chose.
In Austin, a network of carriages and wagons driven by African Americans for reduced fares, about 10 cents by newspaper accounts, provided an alternative form of transportation for those who couldn't or didn't want to walk.
Local African American businessmen and pastors were probably the boycott's leaders, Riles said. Similar boycotts occurred in more than 25 Southern cities.
For a while, the boycott was almost complete. The Austin Statesman described it April 18, 1906, in the vernacular of the time: "The boycott of the cars of the Austin Electric Railway Company by the colored race of this city, which has been gradually growing ever since the city council passed the separate compartment ordinance for the white and colored race in street cars, is now almost as thorough as the agitator of it could desire. Very few Negroes are patronizing the street cars on any of the lines and the number is growing less every day."
The ordinance was approved over objections from the streetcar company, whose foreman said he supported segregating the cars but feared the economic impact of a boycott. And wealthy Austin housewives raised concerns when servants did not report for work, the newspaper reported.
Despite the attention the boycott garnered from the public, it stopped for unknown reasons before the ordinance took effect in June 1906. African Americans were "riding on streetcars as usual" when the passenger dividers were installed, the newspaper said.
That result was typical of the streetcar boycotts of the time. African Americans in a few cities had temporary successes, only to have segregation quietly reinstated later.
But the conflict about seating on public transportation had been around since the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction.
"As segregation laws were passed in Southern cities, one of the central sites that was targeted was public transportation, where whites and African Americans came together in very close public proximity," said Laurie B. Green, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas whose research focuses on the civil rights movement and the South.
There were protests of segregated horse cars in Richmond, Va.; New Orleans; and other cities after the Civil War. And the landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of segregation under the separate-but-equal doctrine, was based on a dispute about seating on a passenger train in Louisiana.
Segregated transportation, which separated people by race and denied African Americans access to first-class travel, was humiliating, Green said.
Prominent African American men often spoke for the boycott participants, but many times, women fueled the protests because they were acutely aware of the discrimination as they traveled daily to go shopping or report to jobs across town, she said.
The failure of the boycotts in Austin and elsewhere isn't that surprising because of the political and social climate of the time, Green said.
"They didn't have much of a leg to stand on, and that would be true until post-World War II," she said.
Later would come more favorable court decisions, bus boycotts and freedom rides that forced change. But the streetcar boycotts were an important step for African Americans who had to start somewhere, Riles said.
"Ever since emancipation, African Americans were trying to take part in their own destiny," Riles said. "That meant they often had to challenge the status quo, the Jim Crow laws."
khumphrey@statesman.com; 445-3658
Streetcar boycotts
At the start of the 20th century, residents organized boycotts against segregated streetcars in more than 25 Southern cities, including:
Atlanta 1900
Montgomery, Ala. 1900-02
New Orleans 1902-03
Little Rock, Ark. 1903
Houston 1903-05
San Antonio 1904-05
Memphis, Tenn. 1905
Austin 1906
Source: Journal of American History
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http://www.statesman.com/news/conten...21boycott.html
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