When did America desegregate public transportation? Most people would probably answer 1955, when Rosa Parks’s refusal to surrender her seat ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott. But the story begins at least 88 years before that, when William Nichols calmly took a seat aboard a whites-only streetcar in New Orleans, Louisiana, and refused to move. The date was April 28, 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War.
Nichols was one of the thousands of African American women and men throughout New Orleans and the nation to declare a nonviolent war on streetcar segregation that year. Using tools familiar to later generations of civil rights activists—marches, boycotts, sit-ins, and rallies—these former slaves and freeborn people of color not only established many of the South’s first racially integrated public institutions, but they also helped expand the civil rights of all Americans.
Since the end of the Civil War in 1865, the nation had struggled to determine the meaning of what President Lincoln called America’s “new birth of freedom.” The Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery, but both northern and southern states and localities still severely restricted the rights of African Americans. In 1866 Congress passed a controversial bill guaranteeing all citizens equal access to their “Civil Rights.” But what, exactly, were civil rights? The list of a man’s rights in society remained undefined. Many argued that civil rights referred primarily to the right to own property, sign contracts, and testify in court, and had little bearing upon a jurisdiction’s authority to restrict voting access or to racially segregate facilities.
Yet for African Americans living in New Orleans, streetcar segregation led to constant inconveniences and chafing insults. While whites could board any streetcar, African Americans were only permitted aboard a limited number of streetcars affixed with large black stars. The term “star” became shorthand for a segregated facility, just as “Jim Crow” would a half century later. There never seemed to be enough star cars, and when one arrived it was often overcrowded. African Americans hated the indignity of crowding aboard overloaded streetcars. White gangs knew this, and often made a point of only riding star cars, to crowd out and humiliate African American passengers, and particularly to harass well-to-do black women.
African American riders continuously tested, resisted, and undermined this degrading segregated streetcar system. They tried to board whites-only streetcars, or refused to board star cars. White men routinely dragged off and pummeled the protestors who attempted to ride in white streetcars. In 1865 Dr. Robert Cromwell, a prominent voting rights activist, reported that a white posse “violently assaulted me… dragged me out of the cars, kicked me, and tore at my clothes, and used abusive language” after his refusal to vacate a whites-only streetcar. The mother of an African American soldier was “brutally ejected,” while attempting to board one with her uniformed son. African American soldiers sometimes employed more radical tactics. In one instance, a group of soldiers annexed a star car and refused to allow white passengers to board; in another, soldiers tried to derail whites-only streetcars.
The city’s African American newspapers and leading political organizers encouraged the onslaught on streetcar segregation. Paul Trevigne, editor of L’Union, the city’s first African American newspaper, proposed sit-ins and boycotts as early as 1862. In 1866, activists began arguing that streetcar segregation violated the new Civil Rights Bill. In advancing this argument, they helped to redefine civil rights, stretching the meaning of the category to encompass a right of equal access to public institutions.
One of these activists was William Nichols. On April 28, 1867, flanked by two white supporters, Nichols took a seat aboard a whites-only car. The driver ordered Nichols off. Nichols refused to go. When the driver tried to drag Nichols out of the car, Nichols went limp. Police arrested Nichols for disturbing the peace by entering a streetcar “set apart for the exclusive right of white persons.”
Spectators packed the courthouse on the day of Nichols’s trial. Many hoped that the case would settle the star car issue once and for all. To evade a definitive ruling, the judge dismissed all charges against Nichols, who immediately countersued the streetcar driver for assault. To avoid future lawsuits, the streetcar company issued new orders to drivers: instead of forcibly removing African Americans who boarded whites-only cars, they should refuse to drive until African American passengers disembarked.
That following week, African Americans launched an all-out assault on the star car system. They gathered “in crowds along the various lines of city railroads,” swamping whites-only streetcars throughout the city. Streetcars ground to a halt as activists and drivers sat for hours in stationary streetcars, each waiting for the other side to back down. Five hundred people assembled in front of Congo Square, the traditional gathering site for slave dances, to watch protestors drive commandeered streetcars back and forth before the cheering crowds. Late on May 5, as scuffles broke out throughout the city and groups of white and black men began preparing for armed confrontation, the chief of police ordered the desegregation of the city’s streetcars. “Have no interference with negroes riding in cars of any kind,” the chief instructed his officers. “No passenger, has a right to eject any other passenger, no matter what his color.”
Across the nation, 1867 was a momentous year for racial integration. Similar protests forced the desegregation of streetcars in Nashville, Richmond, Charleston, and Philadelphia. Many of those cities retained racially integrated streetcars until the rise of Jim Crow a generation later. Through struggles over public transportation, African Americans had helped redefine equal access to public services as a basic civil right. Even the pro-segregationist New Orleans Times recognized that the destruction of the star car system “was the initial step to social equality.” The rallies had barely disbanded before the African American press proposed the next issue: public school integration. Just as a concerted and united effort had forced the abolitionism of the star car system, they wrote, “so will it be with the star schools.”