Segregated streetcars, and the boycott that answered them
Announced 17 April 1904; boycott from 19 April 1904; segregation made compulsory by state law in 1906The Richmond streetcar lines, from Broad Street into Jackson Ward, Richmond City, VA
In April 1904 the Virginia Passenger and Power Company put Black passengers at the back of Richmond's streetcars - which the new state law permitted but did not require. Richmond's Black residents stopped riding, and by mid-May most of them were walking.
On 17 April 1904 the Virginia Passenger and Power Company announced in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, under the headline "Separate the Races", that its streetcars would be segregated: white passengers at the front, Black passengers at the back, with conductors given wide discretion to move anyone. Virginia's 1904 law authorised segregated streetcars but left it to each company to decide. The company decided.
Two days later, on 19 April, a mass meeting of Black Richmonders answered it. John Mitchell Jr., the "Fighting Editor" of the Richmond Planet, made the point that the company had chosen this when the law had not made it choose, and warned what would follow from handing that power to conductors he described as hot headed and domineering young white men. The meeting resolved to protest, the boycott began that day, and Mitchell put it in the paper: "Walking is good now,-let us walk." Maggie Lena Walker, who ran the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank a few streets away in Jackson Ward, joined the call to stay off the cars.
By the middle of May, by the Library of Virginia's account, eighty to ninety per cent of the city's Black riders were walking. The Planet carried the boycott on its front page week after week. Enforcement went on in the cars: Addie Ayres, a maid travelling with her employer, was arrested and fined ten dollars for refusing a conductor's order to move. Late in 1904 the Virginia Passenger and Power Company went bankrupt, blaming a conductors' strike from the previous year rather than the boycott.
The state then removed the choice the boycott had exploited. In 1906 the General Assembly made segregation on public transport compulsory, requiring separate compartments and making non-compliance a misdemeanour, which ended the boycott. Segregation of intrastate transport in Virginia remained lawful until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mitchell's own bank failed in 1922, he was prosecuted and convicted in 1923, the Virginia Supreme Court reversed the conviction in 1925, and he died in poverty in 1929.
The Library of Virginia puts the boycott at eighty to ninety per cent of Black riders by mid-May 1904. Encyclopedia Virginia describes it running for two years, until the 1906 law made segregation mandatory.
Sources
- Stay Off the Cars: The Boycott of the Virginia Passenger and Power CompanyThe UncommonWealth, Library of Virginiauncommonwealth.lva.virginia.govThe 17 April 1904 announcement, the 1904 law's permissive wording, the 19 April mass meeting, the share of riders walking by mid-May, Addie Ayres's arrest, the company's bankruptcy and the 1906 statute.
- John Mitchell Jr. (1863-1929)Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgMitchell's editorship of the Richmond Planet, his words on walking, Maggie Lena Walker's part in the boycott, its two-year span, and the 1906 law that ended it.
- Richmond Streetcar Boycott, Newspaper Articles, 1904Document Bank of Virginia, Library of Virginialva.virginia.govThe contemporaneous newspaper coverage itself, held by the state library; a primary source carrying the framing of 1904.