Lola Houck, September 21, 1886

It is one thing to pass laws separating travelers on the basis of color. It is quite another thing to determine to whom such laws apply. Who is “white”? Who is “Black”? How does one know?  From the earliest days of steamboats and railroads, Jim Crow rules were applied arbitrarily or at times ignored. If no one complained, some train conductors were content to let people of color ride in the “long car,” “ladies’ car,” or “first-class car.”  And there were undoubtedly many times when a “colored” passenger passed as “white” without notice.

On September 21, 1886, Lola Houck and her husband, Leon, were living in Victoria, Texas, when she received a telegram saying that her infant child, at the time with Lola’s mother in Galveston, was very ill. Houck, who was (according to court records) “to some extent pregnant,” immediately booked a first-class ticket on the Southern Pacific Railway to Rosenberg, Texas, where she would then, presumably, make a connection to Galveston.

There were two passenger cars on the train. The rear car was exclusively for white passengers; the front car, the “Jim Crow Car,” was partitioned into two unequal sections. In one section “passengers, white or colored, were allowed to smoke.” The other section was for “colored” passengers.

Lola Houck was very light-complexioned; the legal issue being tried in this case, however, was not whether Lola Houck was “colored.” It was agreed by all parties that she was. But her ability to pass as white becomes relevant insofar as she acknowledged that she had ridden in the rear car without question both before and after that instance.

While still on the platform between the two cars she was challenged by the brakeman as she was about to enter the rear car: “He shut the door in her face, and locked it from the inside, and, holding the keys up against the door—glass, told her that he was inside and she was outside, and she could not come in because she was a negro.” [Quotations are from the court records.]

The conductor came along, took her ticket, and told her to go into the front car. Lest she try to follow him into the rear car, he passed his ticket punch to the brakeman through a window and told him to punch people’s tickets, take their fares, et cetera. He then went into the front car, leaving her on the platform.

At the next stop the brakeman left the door locked and allowed new white passengers in through the car’s rear door. Mrs. Houck got off the train and followed those passengers to the rear platform, where the brakeman once again refused to let her enter. The train started up, leaving her on the car’s rear platform until the next stop, where she returned to the front of the car and tried unsuccessfully to enter again. The conductor told her to go into the Jim Crow car, but she refused and remained on the platform until the train reached Rosenberg, even though it was “an ugly, rainy September day.”

Following this ordeal, Mrs. Houck became ill, was confined to her bed for a number of weeks, and suffered a miscarriage. She and her husband then sued the Southern Pacific Railway for $7,500 for personal damages, and a verdict was delivered in a jury trial in the U.S. circuit court, Eastern District of Texas, on December 11–12, 1888. Mrs. Houck testified to a number of points that the brakeman denied. She said that he had spoken roughly to her, that he had “called the attention of men about the train to the fact that he had a negro riding on the platform,” and that he had pushed her so that she was in danger of falling off the train and in doing so he had torn her dress. She also explained that “the front car had a rough lot of white and colored people in it, and some of them were boisterous and drinking; that the attention of those people had been directed to her by the language and acts of the brakeman, and she was afraid to go in among them.”

The judge instructed the jury that the railway company’s Jim Crow rule was legally justified and that if they determined that the safety and comfort of the two cars were substantially the same, “the plaintiff cannot complain of any injury coming to her because she was denied entrance to the rear car.” He further instructed that the company should only be charged with any injuries resulting directly from the actions of the brakeman or conductor:

“[If] she remained on the platform in the rain, and became sick in consequence thereof, she, by her own negligence, in not going to a better place for protection against the rain and weather was at fault; that if the miscarriage and illness was caused, not by the mental irritations, humiliations, annoyances and rude acts caused by the faults and wrongs of the brakeman, but by the physical discomforts and fatigue which her ride, unseated, on the platform, gave her, she could not recover for the injury inherent in the illness of the miscarriage.”

The all-white jury seems not to have been satisfied as to the equality of accommodations, for they found in favor of the plaintiff, Mrs. Houck, and awarded her “Two thousand Dollars for exemplary damages and Three thousand Dollars for actual damages.”

Judge Aleck Boarman himself acknowledged that the Jim Crow car was “nothing like as comfortable to ride in,” that it “was occupied by boisterous passengers, both white and colored, who were smoking and drinking, as is usually the case in such cars,” and that “the brakeman treated [the] plaintiff, who ‘acted all the time in a ladylike manner,’ rudely, wrongfully, and, in some degree, maliciously.” Yet he reduced the actual damages to $2,500, writing that “it was not at all clear that the miscarriage or illness was of a serious nature; nor was it made sufficiently clear that either the miscarriage or illness came to Mrs. Houck proximately in consequence of the acts of the brakeman, or of the conductor, in denying her admission to the rear car.” (It is unclear whether he let stand the $2,000 exemplary damage award, for he does not mention it again.) The most striking aspects of the judge’s opinion are his doubt that Mrs. Houck’s illness and miscarriage were “of a serious nature,” and the belief that it was not “sufficiently clear” that they were caused by the actions of the brakeman and conductor.

Tangential as it was to Lola Houck’s lawsuit, the larger question remains: what difference does color make? Mrs. Houck had ridden in first-class cars before and after September 21, 1886, and no one was any the wiser; no one suffered a whit of harm because of her presence. The only harm done on that particular day was done to Mrs. Houck—first, as the judge acknowledged, by the wrongful and malicious treatment of the brakeman, and secondly, by the fear and suffering she endured during the ride and her subsequent illness and miscarriage. The jury apparently recognized the latter, though Judge Boarman did not.