May 17: A notable day for civil rights in 1865, 1942, 1954, and 1961

No fewer than eleven events recorded in PRP took place in May between 1838 and 1961, three of them on the 17th. To these we must add a fourth, highly important May 17th event in 1954: the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

A “Colored Man,” May 17, 1865

The victory of a certain Mrs. Derry in court in April 1865 may have affirmed the right of Black Philadelphians to ride the streetcars, but, as in the past, Judge Allison’s ruling did little to ease their experience on the cars. Commenting on an editorial that appeared on May 10 in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, one of only two city papers to offer any opinion on the streetcar companies’ policies, Philip Foner in 1973 aptly summarized, “In the battle against streetcar segregation, optimistic predictions invariably proved to be wrong, and the Bulletin’s conclusion, that conductors would now think twice about ejecting colored passengers, was no exception.” Indeed, a month or less after the conviction of Conductor Lowry, another conductor took a new approach precisely because of the jury’s verdict and Judge Allison’s imposition of a fine on the conductor. Rather than suffer Lowry’s fate, on the one hand, or abandon the dictates of both his employer and his own personal prejudice by failing to expel a passenger, on the other, he tried out a new tactic to skirt the law, as reported in the New York Times:

“The Rights of Colored Citizens.
Curious Affair in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia, Wednesday, May 17–2 p.m.

    Last evening a colored man got into a Pine-street passenger car, and refused all entreaties to leave the car, where his presence appeared to be not desired.

     The conductor of the car, fearful of being fined for ejecting him, as was done by the Judges of one of our courts in a similar case, ran the car off the track, detached the horses, and left the colored man to occupy the car all by himself.

     The colored man still maintains his position in the car, having spent the whole of the night there.

     The conductor looks upon the part he enacted in the affair as a splendid piece of strategy.

     The matter creates quite a sensation in the neighborhood where the car is standing, and crowds of sympathizers flock around the colored man.”

A facetious poem printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on June 3 refers to Mrs. Derry’s victory as “The late decision of the Judge / (Which railroad men think utter fudge),” and on the derailing incident it notes: “The colored person kept his seat, / And black folks brought him things to eat.” The Times and the Inquirer treat the incident with some amusement, but the derailing stratagem must have been thought effective by other conductors and street rowdies, for it was resorted to on numerous occasions in Philadelphia, as in the case of Miles Robinson a year and a half later.

Elmer W. Henderson, May 17, 1942

Traveling from Washington, DC, to Birmingham, Alabama, Elmer W. Henderson, a Black lawyer working for the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee, was denied a seat in a Southern Railway dining car. Henderson filed a complaint with the Interstate Commerce Commission, which ruled that he had indeed received “undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage,” but they went on to say that, rather than a systematic prejudice on the part of the company, it was “a casual incident brought about by the bad judgment of an employee,” thus sidestepping their need to make any decision at all.

Henderson appealed to the U.S. District Court in Maryland, which ruled that the railroad had committed a violation. The railroad then adopted a policy reserving ten tables for white passengers and “one table, of four seats, exclusively and unconditionally for Negro passengers.” While “exclusively and unconditionally” was presumably meant to satisfy the “equal” part of the earlier “separate but equal” ruling resulting from the case of Homer Plessy, this was undercut by allowing a curtain or wooden panel to separate the table for Black diners from all the others. The case ultimately went to the Supreme Court, which overruled the district court’s revised decision that the new rules did not violate the Interstate Commerce Act and specifically stated: “The curtains, partitions and signs emphasize the artificiality of a difference in treatment which serves to call attention to a racial classification of passengers holding identical tickets and using the same public dining facility.”

Brown v. Board of Education, May 17, 1954

In 1951 thirteen parents of twenty children in Topeka, Kansas filed a class-action lawsuit against the Topeka Board of Education. The U.S. District Court of Kansas ruled against the parents and in support of the 1896 Plessy decision which established “separate but equal” into law. The NAACP then combined the Brown case and four others and took Brown v. Board of Education to the Supreme Court under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall. Chief Justice Earl Warren, after carefully building a consensus among the nine justices, wrote the single 9-0 decision, which was published on May 17, 1954, arguing that segregation based solely on race has harmful psychological effects on segregated Black children and dismantling the underlying “separate but equal” doctrine.

Freedom Ride, May 17, 1961

In March 1961 the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC – pronounced ‘snick’) attracted the attention of John Lewis with a call for volunteers for “Freedom Ride 1961,” sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). This first Freedom Ride began on May 4 and traveled through Fredericksburg, Richmond, Petersburg, Farmville, Lynchburg, and Danville, Virginia; Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Salisbury, and Charlotte*, North Carolina; Rock Hill*, Chester, Winnsboro*, and Sumter, South Carolina; Augusta, and Atlanta, Georgia; Anniston*, Birmingham*, and Montgomery*, Alabama. (An asterisk marks places they were attacked or arrested.)

One of the Freedom Ride buses was attacked and firebombed in Anniston, Alabama, on Mother’s Day, May 14. John Lewis had flown to Nashville and on the 17th he and nine other volunteers boarded a bus rejoin the ride in Birmingham. Birmingham police, however, stopped the bus, arrested Jim Zwerg (who was white) and Paul Brooks (who was Black) for sitting together at the front of the bus. When a threatening white crowd gathered at the Birmingham bus station, the notorious public safety commissioner, “Bull” Connor had the Riders all jailed under “protective custody,” where they spent the night singing freedom songs, as much to annoy Connor and the guards as to keep up their own spirits.

On May 20 their bus was escorted by police to Montgomery, where the police abandoned them and they were viciously attacked. In response, more than sixty-one Freedom Rides and related actions were held between then and December 10. All are now celebrated at the Freedom Rides Museum in Montgomery – which I encourage you to visit whenever possible.