By 1950 Black residents were 28 percent of Baton Rouge's 125,000 people and about 80 percent of its bus riders. That year the bus company won an exclusive contract after lobbying the council to revoke the licenses of nearly forty Black-owned bus services. The first ten rows were reserved for white riders, and Black passengers often stood over empty seats. In January 1953 the fare went from ten cents to fifteen.
Ordinance 222
In February the Rev. T. J. Jemison, pastor of Mt. Zion First Baptist Church, asked the all-white city council to let Black riders sit when seats were free. In March it unanimously passed Ordinance 222: first come, first served, with Black riders filling from the back and white riders from the front. Drivers ignored it for three months. In mid-June a housekeeper named Martha White took a seat behind the driver. Another Black woman sat down beside her, and when police arrived Jemison told them the ordinance gave White the right. The company suspended the driver, and the drivers' union walked out. Attorney General Fred LeBlanc then ruled that the ordinance violated Louisiana's segregation laws, and the strike ended.
The free ride
Black leaders formed the United Defense League with Jemison as president. Its secretary, Raymond Scott, went on radio station WLCS and told riders to stay off the buses, and a car pool started the next morning. Churches ran it, free, from 5 a.m. to midnight, because a fare would have made the drivers unlicensed taxis. Jemison recalled 65 to 70 cars and trucks at the peak. Horatio Thompson, the first Black man in the South to hold an Esso franchise, sold them gas at cost. Collection plates raised thousands of dollars within days, and the nightly mass meetings moved to McKinley High School when Mt. Zion could not hold the crowds. Within four days the bus manager called the boycott a hundred percent effective. The boycott's lawyer, Johnnie Jones, a D-Day veteran trained at Southern University's law school, was once boxed onto railroad tracks by two drivers with a train coming before they let him go.
Ordinance 251
On June 24 the council passed a compromise, Ordinance 251. It reserved two front seats for white riders and the long back seat for Black riders and left the rest first come, first served. More than 7,000 people met at the stadium, and many accepted it grudgingly; others felt betrayed. Jemison later said, "We started the boycott simply to get seats for the people," and that he had not been trying to end segregation. In a 1956 letter he put the boycott's length at eight days.
It did not end there. On December 8, 1955, three days into the Montgomery boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. called Jemison for advice, and King later wrote that Jemison's painstaking description of the Baton Rouge car pools was invaluable. Martha White lived to 99 and died in June 2021.
The Capitol Park Museum in Baton Rouge keeps the 1953 boycott in its Jim Crow gallery, set beside galleries on the slave market and on resistance.