The Bus Boycott: Walking in Dignity

While the Montgomery Bus Boycott was becoming world-famous, another boycott began in Tallahassee that drew almost no national attention at the time but changed the city permanently and helped create the infrastructure of the entire civil rights movement.

On May twenty-seventh, nineteen fifty-six, two Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University students named Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson boarded a city bus and sat in the only two available seats, which were in the whites-only section. When ordered to move to the back or leave without a refund, they refused. Three police cars arrived. The women were arrested and charged with inciting a riot.

The next morning, Reverend Charles Kenzie Steele, pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Boulevard, visited the students and pledged support. Within days, the community had organized. The Inter-Civic Council formed with Steele at its head and a list of clear demands: seating on a first-come, first-served basis, courteous treatment of Black riders, and the hiring of Black bus drivers on predominantly Black routes.

For seven months, Tallahassee's Black residents walked. They organized carpools. The city prosecuted twenty-one carpool organizers for running an unlicensed transportation company. Steele's church was targeted by the Klan, who burned a cross on the front lawn on New Year's Day of nineteen fifty-seven.

Steele's rallying phrase became a permanent part of the city's moral vocabulary: I would rather walk in dignity than ride in humiliation.

On November thirteenth, nineteen fifty-six, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a related Alabama case that bus segregation was unconstitutional. On December twenty-second, the Inter-Civic Council declared victory and called off the boycott. Steele went on to be a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization he would help build alongside his friend Reverend Martin Luther King Junior.