Back of the Bus

This event haunted me for 72 years. I finally wrote it down in a memoir class in 2019.  Things are not perfect in this world, and likely never will be. But some things are better than they were in 1947. For that I am thankful.

My list of wanna-do’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving did not include getting on a bus in Laredo at 6:30 in the morning and riding for 13 hours back to Rice Institute in Houston. I knew that boredom and a sore butt were a sure bet. What I didn’t see coming was a searing moment of ineptness and failure. I didn’t see a moment that haunts me still.

Classes would resume the next day, but we three freshmen — Art Ochoa and Lyon Williams and I — didn’t have a car. The bus was our only option for the 350-mile ride back to college. Whether we left Laredo on the blue Greyhound to San Antonio and then through Schulenburg to downtown Houston — or took the red-and-white Continental Trailways’ more countrified route through Hebbronville, Alice, Victoria and Rosenberg — the travel time would be the same. Thirteen hours. But on the southern route, the driver would stop in front of the campus on South Main Street in Houston and let the guys off near their dorms, saving them an extra city bus ride from downtown. So Continental it was.

At least the bus wasn’t crowded, and we claimed the back seat for ourselves. It gave us room to stretch out a little. Princess Elizabeth had married Philip Mountbatten the week before, but Art and Lyon weren’t the least interested in talking about the event that looked so glamorous to me in newspaper photos. Instead, we chatted about the holiday’s parties, got snacks in Alice when we had to change buses. We talked about how different the students in Houston were from our Laredo buddies. Rice boys always leered when we said we were from Laredo. They’d heard stories of the prostitutes in Boys Town on the Mexican side of the river, and couldn’t imagine anything else of interest happening in our border town. I fretted about calculus. Art and Lyon talked about dorm food, which I knew nothing about because women weren’t allowed to live on campus, per William Marsh Rice’s original grant to endow the school. I boarded with the Schwerdtfeger family in West University Place. All three of us marveled at how rainy Houston was compared to Laredo.

This November Sunday, the weather was mild, and we got out and stretched our legs and got a burger at the bus station in Victoria. We had survived the smelly restrooms at the Hebbronville rest stop, passed hundreds of brush country ranches dotted by windmills, gazed at miles of sorghum field stubble drying after harvest in the Gulf Coast area. Rice-growing country would be next. By the time the bus rumbled onto the two-lane highway again, we had only five hours left to endure. We laughed at the story we’d heard at the bus station of the pioneer settler who’d named three little towns in the area after his daughters — Inez, Edna and Louise.

But it was a brief stop in Louise to pick up a passenger at a gas station that changed things. A slender, neatly dressed black man — in his thirties or forties, maybe — got on the bus and gave his ticket to the driver.

The driver turned in his seat and motioned to us to move out of the back row where we’d been lolling all day. The seats in front of us were empty, so I motioned to the driver that the new passenger could sit there. The driver shook his head “No,” and waved his hand, “Move.”

Suddenly the world I had always lived in was upside down. In Laredo, if you had a nickel for the bus, you could sit in any vacant seat your little heart desired. At seventeen I knew, from magazine pictures, that to force a man to accept the “back seat” was to tell him he was worth less. It felt wrong, like a new kind of slavery. The new passenger had paid the same as anyone else for his ticket. This wasn’t playing fair. Surely something would work to change the driver’s mind. I tried smiling at him again and pointed to the three of us, pantomiming that we wanted to stay together.

The bus driver suddenly tired of the teenager disrupting his schedule. He turned his back to us, reached up to the visor, and took down a little booklet.

Then he stood, and turned to face us all. In a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone on the bus, he began to read:

“The Texas law regarding public transportation states, ‘When boarding, all white passengers shall take seats in the forward or front end of the bus, filling the bus from the front end, and all Negro passenger shall take seats in the back or rear end of the bus, filling the bus from the back or rear end.

As the bus driver, I have the authority to remove, or call a police officer to remove, riders who do not board the bus correctly or sit in the proper section. Violators receive a fine of five to $25.’ “

I had heard of Jim Crow practices, but had no idea it was an actual law. This seemed so wrong. Two years after we had finished a worldwide war for freedom, and we were saying, “But no real freedom of choice for you,” to the new passenger. I could feel the blood rushing to my face, both in embarrassment at being the unexpected center of attention, and in anger. This was not what I was raised to believe.

Admittedly, Laredo counted only two black people among its population of almost 50,000. But I knew that one of them, a former slave people called Miss Harriett, had been a midwife there for decades. She was old, having presided at my father’s birth in 1901, but we stopped by her house on most Sunday afternoon drives so that Daddy, now a physician, could “pay his respects” to her.

I finally glanced at the passenger himself.

And I saw terror in his eyes, a look that haunts me to this day. He stood motionless in the aisle, afraid to move, not knowing what might happen to him if he did. It was a look of fear at a level I had never known or seen before.

I surrendered.

I moved up one row, sitting by the window. Art and Lyon moved too, across from me on the right side of the aisle. The new passenger sat down quietly behind us. The bus angled back onto the highway, and the three kids from the border rode in silence the rest of the way. Over the Colorado River, past the prison farm near Sugarland, and finally, onto South Main Street in Houston. For the rest of the trip, the stops and passengers were a blur I can’t recall.

I just stared out the window, my thoughts in a pillow fight with each other.

Was it always better to “go along to get along,” even if a law is unjust? Don’t make waves, people say. But if you never speak up, how can change happen?

Were the other white passengers on the bus all in agreement with this injustice? Did they really believe their skin was enough to make them better?

And the man in whom I had caused such fright, now sitting behind me, perhaps staring at my back — what did he think of my teenage attempt to “play fair”? Had I unwittingly put him in danger? Could he forgive me for that?

It had been a little more than two years since Life Magazine had printed the haunting photos of emaciated German concentration camp survivors after the liberation of Europe. Not speaking up in time could carry an unspeakable price. But how much speaking up should one person do? What was the best way to do it? I could hear my mother’s voice saying, “And who do you think you are, young lady?”

Art and Lyon got off at the Rice campus, a school even more segregated than the bus we were riding. I rode on to the downtown bus terminal. My landlady picked me up and drove me to her home about a mile from campus. The Laredo girl who had done so well in high school was not going to wave a magic wand and change the world for the better, after all. I had no idea what Art and Lyon thought about the afternoon’s events, because we had finished the journey in separated silence, and never spoke of it again.

I had tried. I had failed. I didn’t know, of course, that I would feel the pain of this particular day for the rest of my life. Yet somehow, in spite of the bitter taste of humiliation, I also felt glad that I had tried. I had tried to create a little more equality, even though I did not succeed.

Not trying, not speaking up, would have meant that I accepted the status quo. So I knew I would try again. Over and over and over, as it turned out. I would learn, usually the hard way, that the battle for power and equality is never over. I would also learn, thankfully, that there is sometimes the lovely, sweet taste of progress.

But all of that would wait for another day. Tomorrow was a school day, and the lessons would be of a different sort.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Footnote: After being haunted for more than 70 years by that day on the bus, I wrote this story as a form of catharsis. I also did some research into the law that the driver had read aloud, thinking it had probably been around since the days of Reconstruction. I was wrong. It was put into the State Code of Texas in 1943. It was only four years old.

By the end of World War II in 1945, more than 1 million African-Americans had served their country in the military, and many had lost their lives in that service. Yet, in 1943, eighty years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Texas decided that no white person riding a public bus should have to see a Black rider taking a seat in front of him.

It did not matter that all tickets were the same price. It did not matter that another Texas Black man, Doris (Dorrie) Miller of Waco had received the Navy Cross, the Navy’s highest award, for his valor at Pearl Harbor. It did not matter that the Tuskegee Airmen had flown fighter planes to escort American bombers.

The law stayed in place until forced out by the U. S. Supreme Court on November 13, 1956.