Pioneers of the Bus Boycott

The free ride of June 1953 ran on arithmetic as much as courage. Black residents were 28 percent of the city but about 80 percent of bus riders, and the company is estimated to have lost $1,600 a day while they walked or rode in church cars. The cars ran from 5 a.m. to midnight, and rides had to be free so the city could not call it an unlicensed taxi service. Collection plates raised several thousand dollars in two days. About 7,000 people met at Memorial Stadium and, reluctantly, accepted the compromise. Court challenges then took nine years.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old State Capitol — steps away
  James Dakin's 1850 Gothic castle on the river bluff, gutted in the Civil War, nearly demolished in 1991 and reopened in 1994 as a free museum of political history.
• Capitol Park Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge: a shrimp trawler and a Civil War submarine, galleries on the slave market, resistance and Jim Crow, and the music from Armstrong to Chenier.
• Louisiana State Capitol — 0.7 mi
  A 450-foot Art Deco tower Huey Long pushed through in 1930, finished in 14 months, and the hallway where he was shot in 1935; free to enter and ringed by 27 acres of grounds.
• LSU Rural Life Museum — 4.9 mi
  Four slave cabins moved from Welham Plantation and a working-plantation row of more than twenty saved buildings, on land the Burden family held as Windrush plantation since the 1830s.

More markers nearby

• Alvin Batiste — steps away
• Garner v. Louisiana — steps away
• The C.O.R.E. March — steps away
• Oliver Pollock — steps away