The bus she took avoided going through all but a corner of Mississippi – where it made no stops – and her tour did not include Louisiana, the birthplace of segregated railroad travel.
Her story, “A Negro Tourist in Dixie,” was published in April, 1962, and continues to be read today. Her six-week tour took her through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and part of Mississippi. I was not able to trace her any further than that. In 1966 she left the Sun-Reporter and may have moved to New York City. That year she took part in a panel at a conference on Black writers sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley. In 1964 she was editor of the women’s page of the San Francisco Sun-Reporter. She was a reporter for the ANP, but it is unclear if that was her job at the time of her tour. She and her husband, Albert Hughes, a photographer for the Associated Negro Press, lived in Los Angeles. She was a graduate of Lincoln University in Jefferson City MO where she majored in journalism. Twelve days after the ICC rules took effect a Black journalist, Bettye Rice Hughes, set out on a bus trip through the South to observe firsthand what had changed – and what hadn’t.
In May, 1961, the Freedom Riders were attacked by violent white mobs who beat them and firebombed one of their buses while it was stopped with a flat tire outside Anniston AL. The new rules were issued just months after the Congress of Racial Equality organized “Freedom Rides” with groups of Black and white members who rode buses to Southern states - Alabama and Mississippi in particular - with the intention of challenging segregated bus station facilities. The new regulations went against Jim Crow laws in the South that required separate “white” and “colored” facilities.Īlthough travel on interstate buses had been integrated by the ICC in 1955, the regulations had not covered restaurants or restrooms in the terminals. In November, 1961, new Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) rules took effect requiring all interstate bus terminals to integrate their lunch and waiting rooms.
0 kommentar(er)
