As I watch all of the goings-on in D.C. (and curse myself for not being down there) I am, like the rest of the country, moved by the convergence of Martin Luther King’s birthday and Barack Obama’s inauguration.
Transportation, of course, has been a tool of both social repression and social change. Montgomery, Alabama, had a system of segregation on its buses that is thankfully unthinkable today. Whites filled the seats of the bus from front to back, blacks from back to front. When they met in the middle, all the seats were filled. Then, if a white person boarded the bus, a black person in the “black” seat closest to the front had to give up their seat.
This was the position that Rosa Parks found herself in on December 1, 1944. She later said that she wasn’t trying to start a movement–she was just tired and trying to get home. She was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a while man. A boycott of city buses soon began to protest the racially segregated seating policy. For 381 days, blacks shunned the buses and used carpooling, taxis, bicycling and walking to travel to their jobs anyplace else they needed to go. The boycott ended in 1956 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated seating on buses unconstitutional. While the decision did not end all racial segregation or even ensure fair treatment of blacks during their bus ride, it did open up the transportation system ahead of other areas of society.
Transportation is where we all face a common need: to get to our destination inexpensively, quickly and safely. It is where people of all races, religions and social class converge. A city’s transit system is the heart of a community and a platform for social good. We in the transportation industry have been given an important responsibility to ensure that our transportation resources are provided equitably among all people who depend on it.
Tags: barack obama, Martin Luther King, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks, transportation equity, transportation segregation, transprtation fairness
