Mighty Justice by Dovey Johnson Roundtree

Mighty Justice by Dovey Johnson Roundtree

Author:Dovey Johnson Roundtree
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2019-07-15T00:00:00+00:00


The commission went further still, extending their ruling beyond the vehicles themselves into the area southerners regarded as private ground—the bus and train stations and the waiting rooms therein. Julius and I were astonished; we had not, after all, demanded an order of that reach. But the NAACP had. In its railway case, it had taken the position that the terminals functioned as such an integral part of the interstate transportation system serviced by the railroads as to be inseparable from them for legal purposes. The ICC had agreed, and when it joined our case with the NAACP’s, it made it clear that its reasoning extended to Keys in every particular. In so doing, the ICC had reached beyond the matter of seating on vehicles into the heart of every southern town and village and outpost. Wherever an interstate bus or train stopped to discharge or pick up passengers, white and black must be permitted to share the same space, to sit alongside each other on the same benches, to wait in the same lines, to use the same restrooms. The ruling, of course, did not affect travel within each of the southern states; that realm would remain untouched until Rosa Parks defied the Jim Crow laws of the city of Montgomery, Alabama. The Keys and NAACP rulings also exempted restaurants in the bus and train terminals from their desegregation orders, since they were privately owned businesses. But its potential impact on the vast interconnected web of interstate travel was enormous.

The ICC had also done what the Supreme Court had declined to do five months earlier when it issued its open-ended ruling regarding the implementation of Brown: it had set a firm deadline, and a short one. There was no indulgence of the sort the Court had shown the southern states with its suggestion that they proceed “with all deliberate speed” to effect school desegregation “as soon as practicable.” The segregating states had six weeks from the publication of the decree on November 25, 1955, to comply with the Keys and NAACP rulings. By January 10, 1956, the ICC ordered, all Jim Crow seating on interstate buses and trains must cease, and all signs separating waiting rooms into “Colored” and “White” sections in the terminals serving those buses and trains must be removed.

Newspapers around the country hailed the ruling as a legal breakthrough. “ICC Orders End of Segregation on Trains, Buses—Deadline January 10,” the New York Times announced. Newsweek called the Keys case “a history-making ruling,” and Sarah herself, in a piece in one of the New York papers on Thanksgiving weekend, spoke of the ruling as “the greatest thing for me and my people.”

More than any other single statement, the words of the renowned New York Post columnist Max Lerner touched me most deeply. Dismissing the “blustering” of the diehard politicians from the Deep South who’d begun threatening litigation or flat-out noncompliance, Mr. Lerner spoke of what he felt, as a white person, in the wake of the ICC



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