Segregation in Tennessee in 1959, and one woman's response to it.

The Saturday afternoon Greyhound bus from Nashville to Clarksville, Tennessee was crowded. By the time we pulled out of the station, there were no vacant seats—except for one—next to a black paratrooper. Yet, several passengers chose to stand rather than sit next to him.

It was June 1959, and I was on the last leg of a bus trip from my home in South El Monte, California to Clarksville. I’d graduated from high school a week earlier, and I was on my way to see my sister Patricia, her husband, Leroy and their two-month-old son, Vince.

Leroy was a paratrooper stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. They lived in Clarksville, which is just across the state line from the army base. Leroy was getting out of the Army later in the month, and I was going to help them move back to California.

It was a milestone trip for me. I was traveling on my own for the first time, and the bus ride across much of the United States had been enlightening in many ways including seeing racial segregation, first hand, for the first time in my life.

El Paso, Texas was the first place I encountered “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” waiting rooms, eating facilities and restrooms in bus stations. I’d heard of it, I’d seen it on TV news, but I had never experienced it in person. It was somewhat bewildering. As a seventeen-year-old living in a predominately white suburb such stories were happening to others, not to me. There probably was defacto segregation in California, but not segregation by law.

I couldn’t help wondering how could they do this? How could one group of people force others to be separate from them? How could there be such dislike, if not hatred, for people just because of the color of their skin?

In one Arkansas bus station, however, I smiled when a black janitor came out of a “Whites Only” restroom and then stop to drink from a “Whites Only” drinking fountain. I know he saw me watching him, and I was delighted to see his disregard for that ugly bit of reality.

But contempt for Negroes was rampant and evident in other ways. At the Memphis bus station, early on the last morning of the trip, I was outside with some other passengers. We started talking to a couple of police officers standing next to their black and white 1957 Ford patrol car. One of my fellow bus riders noticed the double barrel shotgun bracketed to the dashboard of the car. He nodded toward it and said, “Do you ever use that thing?” One of the cops, with a “good old boys” chuckle replied, “Never on a white man.”

I felt my stomach tighten. I turned and hurried into the bus station. I took a seat near the boarding gate for the soon to arrive bus to Nashville. I slouched there trying to read my book, barely able to concentrate on the words, and hoping for invisibility. I kept looking at the boarding gate, willing the bus to get there so I could be out of that city as soon as possible.

I had chatted with cops at home, and I knew I would have never heard such an answer from one of them, even if they thought it. The sting of the blatant scorn for blacks by those Memphis cops continued until I boarded the bus and we hit the road for Nashville.

In Nashville, I was one of the first to board the bus for Clarksville, so I had a seat. I had watched the tall black soldier board the bus in his crisp tan uniform, his pants legs bloused in his boots, a sure sign he was a paratrooper,. He took a seat toward he back of the bus, not because he had to, but because that’s where the last two vacant seats happened to be.

A couple of young white women boarded after him, and chose to stand rather than sit next to him. I considered offering one of them my seat until I her turn-up her nose, as if smelling something bad, when it was suggested she take the seat next to paratrooper. I then decided she could stand.

But then, a remarkable thing happened. Another attractive white woman, who was seated across the aisle from the black paratrooper, left her seat, and took the seat next to the him. Of course, one of the standing women quickly grabbed the seat she had vacated. The woman sitting next to the paratrooper struck up a conversation with him, and they chatted throughout the 30-mile trip. When the bus reached the Clarksville station and passenger stood to get off the bus, the young woman did something almost unheard of in Tennessee in 1959—she extended her right hand to the soldier—he did the same—and they shook hands.

That gesture, that personal affirmation of racial equality by that young woman impressed me then, and still does today. She was an example to me, if no one else, that personal action was far more meaningful than all the rhetoric I’d ever heard, or would ever hear, on how we have to have better race relations. She showed me you don’t just talk about it; you do it, where and when you can. Doing so, you make a difference.