Keys v. Carolina Coach Co.

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Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, 64 MCC 769 (1955) is a landmark

civil rights case in the United States in which the Interstate Commerce Commission, in response to a bus segregation complaint filed in 1953 by a Women's Army Corps (WAC) private named Sarah Louise Keys, broke with its historic adherence to the Plessy v. Ferguson separate but equal doctrine and interpreted the non-discrimination language of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 as banning the segregation of black passengers in buses traveling across state lines.[1]

United States Army Photo of PFC Sarah Louise Keys

The case was filed on the eve of the explosion of the

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invoked it in his successful battle to end Jim Crow travel during the Freedom Riders' campaign.[10]

Background

Carolina Trailways Bus Station
, shown with a Carolina Trailways bus, in a postcard from the North Carolina State Archives

The Keys case originated in an incident that occurred at a bus station in the

Interstate Commerce Act's discrimination ban as permitting separate accommodations for the races so long as they were equal.[15] The ICC's separate but equal policy, upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in a 1950 railway dining car segregation case known as Henderson v. United States,[16] thus remained the norm in public transportation.[17]

When Sarah Keys departed her WAC post in Fort Dix,

Trailways vehicle, taking the fifth seat from the front in the white section. When her bus pulled into the Roanoke Rapids Trailways terminal, a new driver took the wheel and demanded that she comply with the carrier's Jim Crow regulation by moving to the so-called "colored section" in the back of the bus so that a white Marine could occupy her seat. Keys refused to move, whereupon the driver emptied the bus, directed the other passengers to another vehicle, and barred Keys from boarding it. An altercation ensued and Keys was arrested, charged with disorderly conduct, jailed incommunicado overnight, then convicted of the disorderly conduct charge and fined $25.[18]

Unwilling to accept the verdict of the North Carolina lower court sustaining the charge, Keys and her father brought the matter to the attention of the

George E.C. Hayes, and they were deeply involved in the movement to dismantle segregation in the courts.[3]
Writing years later in her autobiography about the unique bond she had with her client, Dovey Roundtree said, "It was as though I sat looking in a mirror, so strong was my sense of having walked where Sarah Keys had walked."

Three-year battle

Keys' co-counsel Dovey Johnson Roundtree (1994 photo)

The match of client Sarah Keys with the young firm of Robertson and Roundtree proved fortuitous, as did the timing of the case, which unfolded during the same two-year period that the

US District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the Keys complaint on February 23, 1953, on jurisdictional grounds, Roundtree and Robertson elected to bring their case before the Interstate Commerce Commission, which they believed might be persuaded to re-evaluate its traditional interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Act, in the same way that the Supreme Court was then re-evaluating its interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.[22][23] On September 1, 1953, two months before Thurgood Marshall and his legal team made the second round of oral arguments in Brown before the Supreme Court asserting that the Fourteenth Amendment's "equal protection" clause prohibited segregation, Sarah Keys became the first black petitioner to bring a complaint before the Commission on a Jim Crow bus matter.[24]

When the Supreme Court handed down its epochal ruling on May 17, 1954, in

US Constitution and the Supreme Court's reasoning in Brown and applied it explicitly to the area of transportation.[27][3]

On November 7, 1955, in a historic ruling, the Commission condemned 'separate but equal' in the field where it had begun—public transportation. In the Keys case, and in the NAACP's companion train case attacking segregation on railroads and in terminal waiting rooms, NAACP v. St. Louis-Santa Fe Railway Company, the ICC ruled that the

Interstate Commerce Act prohibited segregation itself.[28] The Keys decision, made public just one week before Rosa Parks' defiance of the bus segregation laws of the city of Montgomery,[5]
banned segregation itself as an assault upon the personhood of black travelers, and held in part:

"We conclude that the assignment of seats on interstate buses, so designated as to imply the inherent inferiority of a traveler solely because of race or color, must be regarded as subjecting the traveler to unjust discrimination, and undue and unreasonable prejudice and disadvantage...We find that the practice of defendant requiring that Negro interstate passengers occupy space or seats in specified portions of its buses, subjects such passengers to unjust discrimination, and undue and unreasonable prejudice and disadvantage, in violation of Section 216 (d) of the Interstate Commerce Act and is therefore unlawful."[18]

Enforcement

Hailed by the press as a "symbol of a movement that cannot be held back,"[29] the Keys case marked a turning point in the legal battle against segregation, and a major departure from the ICC's history in racial matters. However, in the short term it lay dormant, its intent thwarted by the one ICC commissioner who had dissented from the majority opinion, South Carolina Democrat J. Monroe Johnson.[1] In his position as chairman of the commission, Johnson consistently failed to enforce the Keys ruling, and it was not until the summer of 1961, when the violence resulting from the Freedom Riders' campaign prompted Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to take action, that the impact of the Keys case was felt.

Impelled by the protests of civil rights leaders and the weight of international outrage at the brutality perpetrated on the Freedom Riders[30] Kennedy took the unusual legal step of issuing a petition to the Interstate Commerce Commission on May 29, 1961, in which he called upon them to implement their own rulings. Citing the Keys and NAACP train case, along with the Supreme Court's 1960 Boynton v. Virginia ruling[31] prohibiting segregation in terminal waiting rooms, restaurants and restrooms, the Attorney General called upon the ICC to issue specific regulations banning Jim Crow in interstate travel, and to take immediate steps to enforce those regulations.[10][32]

Historical perspective

A major breakthrough in the legal battle for civil rights, Keys v. Carolina Coach Company has generally been eclipsed in historical accounts of the movement by the events which followed it, notably the defiance of Montgomery, Alabama's city bus laws by Rosa Parks and the resultant Montgomery bus boycott. Parks' action assumed an importance far beyond the level of a municipal incident, giving rise to a Supreme Court decision banning segregation in travel within the individual states (Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903 (1956)) and igniting the civil rights campaign which thrust the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. onto the national stage and paved the way for further reforms.[33] The protest movement King led created an environment in which Keys and other desegregation rulings could be implemented. For this reason, Keys represents one critical piece in the complex and multi-faceted fight for civil rights, in which the legal and the activist streams sustained each other and in combination precipitated the dismantling of Jim Crow.

References

  1. ^ a b Barnes 1983, pp. 99–100
  2. ^ a b McCabe 2002, pp. 124–125
  3. ^ a b c d e McCabe & Roundtree 2009
  4. ^ 298 ICC 355 (1955).
  5. ^ a b Barnes 1983, p. 108
  6. ^ 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
  7. ^ Barnes 1983, pp. 98–100
  8. ^ 163 U.S. 537 (1896)
  9. ^ Barnes 1983, pp. 86–107
  10. ^ a b Kennedy, Robert F.; et al. (May 29, 1961). Statement by Attorney General on Behalf of the United States in Support of Petition for Rule Making (Report). Representations by interested parties before the Interstate Commerce Commission. Motor Carrier Complaints MC-C-3358 – via JFK Library (WHTPP-099-008), in the matter of Discrimination in Operation of Interstate Motor Carriers of Passengers, 86 MCC 743 (1961). For review see "Rules and Regulations: Title 49 – Transportation, Part 180a" (PDF). Federal Register. 26 (188). Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Archives: 9166. September 29, 1961.
  11. ^ Barnes 1983, p. 87, citing ICC ruling in Keys 1955
  12. ^ 328 U.S. 373 (1946)
  13. ^ Barnes 1983, pp. 44–51
  14. ^ Barnes 1983, pp. 52–53
  15. ^ Barnes 1983, pp. 6–7, 21–28, 67–71
  16. ^ 399 U.S. 816 (1950)
  17. ^ Barnes 1983, pp. 75–81
  18. ^ a b Keys v. Carolina Coach, 64 MCC 769 (1955).
  19. ^ McCabe 2002, p. 124
  20. ^ Greenberg 1997, p. 103
  21. ^ Barnes 1983, pp. 92–94
  22. ^ McCabe 2002, p. 125
  23. ^ Barnes 1983, pp. 87–96
  24. ^ Barnes 1983, p. 87
  25. ^ Report and Order Recommended by Isadore Freidson, Examiner, Sept. 30, 1954
  26. ^ "ICC Examiner's Ruling Favors Jimcrow Bias," Daily Worker, September 30, 1954
  27. ^ "Exceptions to Proposed Report and Order," Robertson and Roundtree to the ICC, October 19, 1954
  28. ^ Barnes 1983, p. 98
  29. ^ Lerner 1955
  30. ^ Barnes 1983, pp. 168–169
  31. ^ 364 U.S. 454 (1960)
  32. ^ Barnes 1983, p. 169
  33. ^ Barnes 1983, pp. 108–131

Source materials

External links

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