Committee members for the local Bench by the Road project: from left, Garrick Mayweather Sr., Modrall Lathers, Sarah Corie, April Hawthorne, Jeremiah Rogers, Sadie Roberts-Joseph, Lori Martin, Rev. Raymond A. Jetson, Judge Trudy White, Marc Garnier, Lisa Freeman, Kali Johnson, Melanie Henderson and Ronnise Clark. (Photo by Collin Richie)
Bench to be unveiled in February honors 1953 Baton Rouge bus boycott
It might be just a bench, but it honors a major civil rights moment in Baton Rouge
When Lori Martin and her family were getting to know their new city, she found that the stories of people of color seemed underrepresented at Baton Rouge museums and landmarks.
Martin, an associate professor of sociology, joined the LSU faculty in 2013. As she got more involved in the community, she learned about one of the seminal events in local civil rights history: the 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge. Thought to be the first such boycott in America, it influenced the famous 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus protest associated with Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Despite its historical significance, the Baton Rouge protest remains relatively unknown. A local group, which Martin co-chairs, and the Toni Morrison Society are trying to spread the word.
Morrison, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, remarked in a 1988 speech on the dearth of historical markers dedicated to slaves. “There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby,” Morrison said, according to a transcript in UU World magazine. “There’s no 300-foot tower, there’s no small bench by the road.”
The Toni Morrison Society, founded in 1993, took “a bench by the road” as its motto. The society launched the Bench by the Road Project in 2006, marking important but overlooked moments in African-American history with specially designed black steel benches.
“We see our projects as a kind of outdoor museum,” says founding society member Carolyn Denard. “People can go to the site, read about what happened and sit there and reflect.”
Relying in large part on Martin’s research, the society recently placed a bench in Martin’s hometown of Nyack, New York, honoring Cynthia Hesdra, an ex-slave, Underground Railroad “conductor” and successful entrepreneur. Martin brought the idea of a Baton Rouge bench to the Rev. Raymond Jetson of Star Hill Baptist Church, who helped her with the society’s application.
The late Rev. T.J. Jemison, a leader of the Baton Rouge boycott, recalled watching buses pass by his church and seeing black people standing in the aisles, banned by law from sitting in seats reserved for whites. “I thought that was just out of order; that was just cruel,” Jemison told NPR in 2003.
About 80% of the bus riders were black, and it took only eight days for the boycott to force a compromise: Blacks would be permitted to sit in most seats but never in the front two. And if whites boarded the bus, Martin explains, blacks were supposed to move back, so that no black riders were sitting in front of white riders.
“The idea was to maintain the segregation of the races [and] the racial ideology that whites are in the dominant position, and people of color were subordinate,” she says, adding that the controversial decision not to push for full integration might help explain why the Baton Rouge boycott is not better known.
“In hindsight, we can see it as more of a stepping stone and an event that provided lessons that other people could use for motivation and a blueprint for their struggles,” Martin says.
Jetson notes that the Montgomery boycott lasted much longer and had the larger purpose of bringing the fight against segregation to the federal level.
“The Baton Rouge boycott was about remedying a wrong here in Baton Rouge,” Jetson says.
Denard says the significance of the Baton Rouge boycott, and its relative obscurity, made it a perfect fit for the bench project.
The bench will be placed in front of the McKinley High School Alumni Center on Thomas H. Delpit Drive. McKinley was the first high school for black students in Baton Rouge and served as a meeting place for civil rights activists.
The Toni Morrison Society says the Baton Rouge bench placement will be its 17th. The bench will be unveiled Feb. 6 in a ceremony beginning at 9 a.m.
The event will feature Chris Tyson, an LSU Law School associate professor, as keynote speaker, and a live dance production titled “The Fading Line: A Commemoration of the 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott.”
The steel bench comes with a bronze plaque describing the project and the significance of the Baton Rouge memorial. It’s a fairly humble acknowledgement of such an important event. But for a bus boycott, a bench is an especially apt remembrance.
“The boycott had long-term implications for the community, in terms of recognizing leadership and the potential to bring about change,” Jetson says. “While I am not suggesting the bench is the only way or the best way to do it, it is certainly a step in that direction.”
