By Richard Marcantonio and Marc Brenman
In modern society, travel is integral to both freedom and opportunity. Inequality in regard to mobility is no less important a social injustice than are segregated housing and unequal education. The history of transportation in the U.S., in fact, is deeply intertwined with the history of struggles for equality and civil rights. While that history is one of persistent inequities that have injured low-income communities of color, it is equally one of persistent struggles by those communities for justice.
In sketching this concise history, we find it helpful to frame key events within three defining phases: civil rights struggles in the age of Jim Crow, post-War “white flight” and urban renewal, and the current legacy of spatial segregation and exclusion from opportunity that so many low-income communities of color struggle against today under the banner of Environmental Justice.
From Slave Ships to ‘Separate but Equal’ Railroad Cars
Transportation injustice in the United States dates back to the involuntary transport of Africans to the American colonies. The regulation of transportation was not only central to the origins of slavery, but also to its maintenance. For instance, the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 legislated the return of escaped slaves to their owners. The Underground Railroad took aim at this system by helping to covertly transport enslaved people to their freedom in non-slave states like Canada and Mexico.
Even after the Emancipation, a Reconstruction-era effort by Congress to secure “the full and equal enjoyment” of “public conveyances on land or water” was invalidated by the Supreme Court in 1883. As a result, by the late 1890s, railroad cars — like other public facilities — were still designated as white-only in many states. In a deliberate act of civil disobedience planned by an organized civil rights committee in New Orleans, Homer Plessy was arrested when he boarded, and refused to leave, a white-only train car. His suit, Plessy v. Ferguson, led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine, which helped freeze race relations in place for over half a century.
Transportation’s Starring Role in the Modern Civil Rights Movement
The “separate but equal” doctrine was finally struck down in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Even then, however, efforts to desegregate transportation remained at the heart of civil rights struggles. On December 1, 1955, the secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on the city bus. Although many popular histories portray this as a spur-of-the-moment rebellion, in fact the local NAACP chapter planned it, and chose Rosa Parks to carry it out.
Ms. Parks’ arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the emergence of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). In leading the boycott against Montgomery’s bus system, lasting more than a year, Dr. King and the MIA effectively used nonviolent means to apply economic pressure. The group’s demands quickly expanded to encompass more equal access to municipal services that went beyond bus seating.
In 1956, the MIA filed suit in federal district court to challenge the constitutionality of local bus segregation laws. Although the court ruled in favor of the MIA in June 1956, the city refused to accept the ruling, sending the case to the Supreme Court. The defendants, represented by a handful of lawyers led by Thurgood Marshall, won a ruling that segregation on city buses was unconstitutional in 1956, just two years after Brown.
A few years later, in 1961, a group of activists, both black and white, who called themselves Freedom Riders, tested that verdict. They heroically journeyed from Washington, D.C., through the deep South to New Orleans on interstate buses in an effort to desegregate interstate travel facilities. At different terminals the black Freedom Riders would go to white dining areas and waiting rooms, while the white riders went to the areas reserved for blacks. Their actions spurred attacks and riots by white segregationists, and many of the riders were arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, for infractions of the state’s segregation laws. But their strategy paid off: that same year, the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation in all interstate transportation facilities.
New Challenges: White Flight and Urban Renewal
By now, the massive metropolitan dislocations of the post-World War II period were well under way. A new era in the history of transportation justice grew out the movement of white Americans from urban centers to the newly-emerging suburbs. This “white flight” was no accident, but rather was powerfully fueled by federal policies that conferred massive benefits on higher-income whites, at the expense of lower-income people of color who remained behind, often involuntarily, in the central cities.
Federal policy, for instance, poured billions into the creation of the interstate highway system, promoting the development of formerly inaccessible exurban farm land with single-family homes. While the homeowner mortgage tax deduction helped new suburbanites buy those homes, redlining disqualified people of color from receiving the loans to purchase them. Some of these new suburban developments were expressly designated as “whites only.” Other important federal benefits, like those of the GI Bill with its low-cost Department of Veterans Affairs loans, went primarily to whites.
The departure of white families from older central city neighborhoods also provoked a hemorrhaging of tax base and private investment from those neighborhoods. For the low-income people and people of color who were left behind, that meant under-funded schools, lower levels of municipal service, heavier tax burdens, less access to work, deteriorating housing stock often owned by absentee landlords, and lower levels of safety and health.
This drain both of white population and of resources from the central cities set the stage for the disastrous policies of urban renewal, fostered by both local and federal government. Between 1948 and 1973, urban renewal projects displaced one million people in 2,500 neighborhoods in 993 American cities. Of those neighborhoods impacted by the far-reaching federal program, approximately 1,600 were predominately African-American. In addition to the severe displacement and loss of homes that urban renewal brought, it had the effect of further concentrating and segregating low-income residential areas of cities. Into the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, more exclusionary zoning, highway construction, urban renewal, and public housing developments further segregated the city and limited opportunities for blacks and other people of color. Interstate highway construction often cut through African-American communities, and the freeways erected new barriers to integration.
The injustice of these projects was two-fold: not only did all of their burdens fall on the most vulnerable communities, but the overwhelming share of their benefits went to suburban commuters. West Oakland provides a good example. Its location at the foot of the Bay Bridge to San Francisco made it a target for regional planners who had the welfare of commuting suburban professionals, not local residents, in mind. After all, the suburban dream was nothing without access to good jobs. Thus, while West Oakland was the site of enormous public investment in transportation infrastructure, this investment benefited suburban professionals, and brought only grief to the community. For those who did not lose their homes, the outcome was massive barriers dividing neighborhoods in the form of new freeways linking suburbs to San Francisco, and the railroad tracks for the Bay Area Rapid Transit train, known as BART.
In short, the community got the burdens, but not the benefits, of all that investment. This was true not only of the freeways, but also of BART. In 1977, the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the regional transportation agency which oversees BART, conducted a study to determine if people of color were benefiting from the region’s new rail service. That report found that low income minorities used the system little, even though BART traversed many minority communities, because of the very way it was designed: to carry long distance suburban commuters (who are predominantly white) to jobs in downtown San Francisco and Oakland, not to meet the local travel needs of the residents of those minority communities.
The BART experience exemplifies a common legacy of the urban renewal era, and one that is still operating in many cities today: costly rail systems designed primarily for service from the outlying areas of a metropolitan area are promoted and expanded, despite the fact that they are likely to provide few travel advantages for low-income communities of color, and often come at the expense of the local bus service on which they rely.
Today’s Struggles Over Spatial Segregation
Suburban sprawl and urban renewal left in their wake a metropolitan landscape marked by deepening segregation by race and income, radically redrawing the map of opportunity and exclusion in metropolitan regions across America. This led to the third phase of transportation justice history, in which we find ourselves today.
Today’s struggles owe a great deal to the emergence of the Environmental Justice movement. A 1979 paper by Dr. Robert Bullard on an African-American community’s attempt to block the citing of a sanitary landfill marked a growing awareness that health and environmental hazards like toxic dumps were disproportionately located in communities of color and low-income people. In fact, in 1983 the Governmental Accounting Office reported that three of four hazardous waste facilities in the Southeastern United States were sited in African-American communities. In 1987 the United Church of Christ, under the leadership of Dr. Charles Lee, published the groundbreaking study “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States.” The new Environmental Justice movement put a civil rights lens on mainstream environmentalism, highlighting environmental racism and fueling grassroots activism across the country. Over 500 organizations participated when the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice convened the first People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, resulting in a set of guiding principles for the Environmental Justice movement.
By the time President Clinton issued his Executive Order on Environmental Justice in 1994, Environmental Justice came to encompass fairness in the distribution of both the benefits and the burdens of public decision-making, and provided a new lens for structural inequality.
Against the backdrop of this growing awareness of place-based structural inequality, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union inaugurated a new era in transportation justice in the mid-1990s. L.A. bus riders were overwhelmingly people of color who earned under $12,000 a year. And these riders — African-American janitors, Latino hotel workers, Korean garment workers — were standing on crowded buses after a hard day at work. To add insult to injury, they kept seeing their fares go up.
Aiming to build bridges between labor and working communities, the Labor/Community Strategy Center started organizing L.A. bus riders. They viewed the buses as “factories on wheels” that offered a new opportunity for organizing.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), L.A.’s transit operator, ran both bus and light rail service. In 1994, when MTA raised bus fares again, the Bus Riders Union followed the money and discovered that their fare increase was slated to build a new rail line to the suburbs. They filed a landmark lawsuit under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination by recipients of federal funding. They negotiated a consent decree, and then carefully monitored MTA’s compliance with its terms.
The outcome was over $1 billion in bus service improvements spanning a 10-year period. The Bus Riders Union forced MTA to add hundreds of thousands of hours of service, to keep fares affordable and to reduce overcrowding. A new vision of equity was at the heart of their campaign. They saw that bus service was a critical gate to opportunity for low-income communities of color. And they also paid close attention to the links to public health and the environment. In fact, a direct outcome of the settlement is that MTA now runs the largest fleet of clean fuel buses in the nation.
The Road Ahead
The organized bus riders in Los Angeles changed the discourse about transportation in L.A. Unfortunately, a 2001 ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court made it impossible to bring this type of lawsuit under Title VI without proof of intentional discrimination.
But the Bus Riders Union and their able attorneys became an inspiration for the rest of the nation, demonstrating that although advances in transportation justice have frequently been offset by new obstacles over the course of history, we have reason to hope. It is clear now that the very same policies that isolated low-wealth people and people of color from opportunity also created an environment marked by sprawl and a heavy dependence on the automobile. This car dependence works heavily against African-Americans, as we saw in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, because African-Americans own cars at the lowest rate of any demographic group in the United States. Today, fighting for just transportation policies is actually an opportunity to bring our regions closer to a vision of sustainability that can be shared across the divides of class, race and geography. That vision rests on the benefits of public investment being shared fairly by all our communities.
In today’s “great recession,” public transit service is being slashed across the nation. National transportation justice coalitions like Transit Riders for Public Transportation and the Transportation Equity Network have been joined by traditional civil rights groups like the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights to work locally and in Congress to maintain and increase public transit, and to restore the private right of action under Title VI. When service cuts fall disproportionately on people of color, local groups are taking action. For example, in Los Angeles, the Bus Riders Union filed a Title VI administrative complaint with the Federal Transit Administration alleging that L.A. Metro has decimated bus service while leaving rail service intact, with a disparate impact on riders of color. Other Title VI complaints target regional planning agencies, such as the Bay Area’s MTC.
Social and physical mobility are just as important today as much earlier in American history. Improved mass transit has environmental and jobs benefits as well. Activists and advocates continue to make history on the ground, battling the economy and a rising tide of conservatism. The tools and lessons of the past are applicable today. Literally, transportation justice advocates cannot stand still. Without our work, the bus may not be coming.
For a more comprehensive overview of the history of transportation justice, please see Marc Brenman’s 2007 article that appeared in the American Bar Association’s Human Rights Magazine, “Transportation Inequity in the United States: A Historical Overview.”
For an update on transportation justice campaigns in the San Francisco Bay Area, see Richard Marcantonio’s 2011 article that appeared in an early issue of the Race Equity Project E-Newsletter, “Opening the Gateway to Opportunity: Approaches to Transit Advocacy.”
Richard A. Marcantonio is a Managing Attorney for Public Advocates Inc., a non-profit public interest law firm in San Francisco, California. Marc Brenman is former Executive Director of the Washington State Human Rights Commission and former Senior Policy Advisor for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
