What were the Jim Crow rules when on a bus?

Question

As in a black person had to give up their seat on a bus for a white person - what else?

Answer 1

Blacks sit at the back. Whites sit at the front. In the middle there are seats where blacks are allowed to sit, but they have to go and stand at the back once the white seats are full.

I don't know where the red men had to travel.

Answer 2

The general name given to the segregation of whites and blacks in the south, although the bus incident is the best known since it got national attention.

Drinking fountains, for example, with the famous sign "White only" while the colored had one behind the store, maybe. Barber shops that catered to white only customers, and they knew if they let a black in all their customers would leave.

After a while segregation was looked at by the courts, but they found it to be acceptable based on the "seperate but equal" rule. You could have 2 drinking fountains, as long as they were essentially the same, but if the one for whites was cooled with a refrigerator, then the one for blacks had to be also. Of course separate is never equal.

Some quotes: Ida Wells (1862-1931), an African American journalist, was one of the leaders of the fight against Jim Crow laws.

In the ten years succeeded the Civil War thousands of Negroes were murdered for the crime of casting a ballot. As a consequence their vote is entirely nullified throughout the entire South. The laws of the Southern states make it a crime for whites and Negroes to inter-marry or even ride in the same railway carriage. Both crimes are punishable by fine and imprisonment. The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

Ray Stannard Baker, American Magazine, Following the Color Line (1908)

One of the points in which I was especially interested was the Jim Crow regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars and railroad trains.

I was curious to see how the system worked out in Atlanta. Over the door of each car, I found the sign: "White people will seat from front of car toward the back and colored people from toward front". Sure enough, I found the white people in front and the Negroes behind.

As the sign indicates, there is no definite line of division between the white seats and the black seats, as in many other Southern cities. This very absence of a clear demarcation is significant of many relationships in the South. The colour line is drawn, but neither race knows just where it is. Indeed, it can hardly be definitely drawn in many relationships, because it is constantly changing. This uncertainty is a fertile source of friction and bitterness.

The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

"We pay first-class fare," said one of the leading Negroes in Atlanta, "exactly as the white man does, but we don't get first-class service. I say it isn't fair."

Charles T. Hopkins, a leader in the Civic League and one of the prominent lawyers of the city, told me that he believed the Negroes should be given their definite seats in every car; he said that he personally made it a practice to stand up rather than to take any one of the four back seats, which he considered as belonging to the Negroes.

Answer 3

What rock did you just come out from underneath of? Go here and learn. You might benefit from a Black History class too.

Answer 4

Then this stupid PC stuff happened -- now folks can sit whereever they want! See what happens!