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I was a little kid growing up in Ponca City, OK in the early '60s. Oklahoma did not have near the problems as did some of the other states due to the fact that Oklahoma had had the Tulsa race riot in the early 20's and had learned some hard lessons. Although there were some troubles during civil rights times it was not like Arkansas or other southern states.
In our town the blacks were all sequestered in the bottomlands by the Arkansas river in an area known as "Dixie Hill". The city had integrated the high school and junior highs by then but the black elementary students still attended Crispus Attucks school in there area. Previously all black students had gone to Attucks for all 12 grades.
We lived 3 blocks from this area and rarely if ever saw any blacks. Generally, if you saw blacks it was on Saturday downtown or they were going to and from jobs (many times as housekeepers in white homes). This is what I remember more than anything is there just wasn't any interaction between whites and blacks.
By 1973 (about 8 years later) we had moved clear across town and were probably 3 miles from Dixie Hill. It was that year that two or 3 families moved out of Dixie Hill and into our neighborhood. Two of the families had boys my age and we became friends. That year, our high school's star athlete (black guy) had a white girlfriend whom he later married. This would have been unheard of even 5-6 years before that time.
It seems to me that the period between 1965 and 1970 blacks began to feel some sense of empowerment that they did not feel before that time.
That bus is Hollywood, Florida, not Hollywood Los Angeles. Collins Avenue runs from Broward County to Miami. Hollywood, FL is in Broward County on the border with Miami Dade.
Los Angeles has a Collins St. in the San Fernando Valley, but I'm not sure it existed in 1955.
Yes, you're correct about Cheyney State. I don't know the other historically black college. I'm from the other side of the state, Pittsburgh. My mistake.
Lincoln University is the other one. I remember reading a story about Joe Namath and that when he got to Alabama, where he played his college ball, that it was different from his upbringing in Beaver Falls.
I've seen old senior class pictures from Western PA high schools from the 1920's that were integration. One old yearbook did have the pictures segregated by race though. I think it was from Washington, if I'm not mistaken.
That bus is Hollywood, Florida, not Hollywood Los Angeles. Collins Avenue runs from Broward County to Miami. Hollywood, FL is in Broward County on the border with Miami Dade.
Los Angeles has a Collins St. in the San Fernando Valley, but I'm not sure it existed in 1955.
You are exactly right. Whoever wrote the caption for that photo must've assumed "Hollywood" meant LA. Those of us who know South FL know that Collins Ave is the main drag of Miami Beach. And as you said, it runs to the Broward County line, at the town of Hollywood, FL. And yes, Jim Crow was alive and kicking in FL in the 50s and early 60s.
Lincoln University is the other one. I remember reading a story about Joe Namath and that when he got to Alabama, where he played his college ball, that it was different from his upbringing in Beaver Falls.
I've seen old senior class pictures from Western PA high schools from the 1920's that were integration. One old yearbook did have the pictures segregated by race though. I think it was from Washington, if I'm not mistaken.
LOL! As my father liked to say, "Joe Namath, my daughter and I all went to the same high school".
BFHS was integrated when my father went there from 1927-1931. I'm not going to say there was no racism in BF, or its big city, Pittsburgh, but it wasn't "the deep south", either.
Just thought I'd add, Gale Sayers went to DH's high school in Omaha, NE. Sayers and my brother-in-law ran track together back in the late 50s/early 60s.
Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1954 triggered the renowned Montgomery bus boycott, but it was a less familiar protest action by Irene Morgan a decade earlier that led the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional. In the spring of 1946, Morgan climbed on a bus in Tidewater Virginia, bound for Baltimore. The driver ordered her to the back, but Morgan refused. She was arrested and fined $10. Thurgood Marshall argued the case at the Supreme Court, his fourth appearance there. Marshall argued:
Today we are just emerging from a war in which all of the people of the United States were united in a death struggle against the apostles of racism. How much clearer must it be today than it was in 1877, that the national business of interstate commerce is not to be disfigured by disruptive local practices bred of racial notions alien to our national ideals?
In the spring of 1946 the Supreme Court decided almost unanimously that state segregation placed an 'unfair burden' on interstate commerce, spelling the demise of legal segregation in interstate transportation.
Trains also had this same sotto voce version of Jim Crow nationwide. In that case it usually was a matter of "if you can afford this ticket, you can sit on this car, and if you can afford that ticket you sit on that car". In 2011 that might seem like a fair, economic based, reason for seating. However, in the pre-Civil Rights era it didn't matter if you could afford the ticket it or not. If you weren't white, there just weren't areas you were allowed to sit.
Don't fool yourselves for a second that segregation did not exist outside the South in those times. Sure, it was often not as prevalent in society, but it was very much there. Just ask the black soldiers who came back from Europe after World War II and the defeat of Nazism/Facism...to only be divided up by color when they disembarked in New York City.
Short memories serves no justice to our heroes.
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Segregated public transportation was not practiced throughout the nation, it was only practiced in the South.
