Atlanta Public Bus Desegregation 53 Years Ago

Fifty-three years ago Jan 22, the city of Atlanta desegregated public transportation, according to a tweet this morning from The Atlanta History Center (@ATLHistCenter) linking tweeple back to their "On This Day" page.

The page does not go into detail about this bit of pre-MARTA Atlanta history, but The Atlanta Regional Council for Higher Education's comprehensive "Atlanta in the Civil Rights Movement" website—to which The Atlanta History Center provides resources and information—offers this background:

"The fight to desegregate public transportation in Atlanta met with less overt hostility but no less formidable opposition. In 1957, in the wake of the successful Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, a group of 100 black Atlanta ministers of the "Law, Love, and Liberation" movement attempted to challenge segregated seating on local public transportation. Rather than staging a mass boycott as had been done in Montgomery, only six of the ministers attempted to board a bus and sit in the area reserved for whites. The six protesters included the Rev. William Holmes Borders, the pastor of Wheat Street Baptist Church on Auburn and one of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s role models. The ministers were arrested on state charges. As planned, the Rev. Samuel Williams, now the head of the city's NAACP chapter, filed a suit in federal court to force the desegregation of Atlanta's buses and trolleys. Two years later, segregated seating on Atlanta's public transportation was declared unconstitutional.

Later in 1957, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, along with civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta. A number of the city's ministers who had united around the issue of bus desegregation joined this organization. Ultimately, the SCLC institutionalized the network of ministers engaged in civil rights activities around the country. Its primary goal was to use nonviolent tactics to help local organizations push for full equality of African Americans."

Many Cascade seniors lived through the tumultuous civil rights movement in Atlanta. Are you one of them? If so, won't you share some of your memories with us here in comments or in a Letter to the Editor (email to Cascade@Patch.com). 

We would love to hear and learn from you!