by
Thomas J. Davis, Ph.D., J.D.
Professor
Department of History
Arizona State University
It was not so long ago that American apartheid stood in full force. "Whites Only" signs marked much of the U.S. socialscape fewer than 50 years ago. In the 15 states that maintained slavery in 1860, the signs stood written and prominent in the 1950s. They communicated public policy with the force of law. They announced de jure segregation. Elsewhere in the nation racial segregation was no less visible, even in the absence of blatant signage. The bans against blacks' being uppity, not knowing their place and crossing the line of social
order were not necessarily posted on public displays. They stood not by force of law. Yet, they were no less public policy. They were custom and practice. They existed as de facto segregation. They reached everywhere. From public toilets to city bus seating, little was beyond the color line.
The struggle against segregation was not new in the 1950s. Blacks were protesting to get first-come first-served seating on city buses and other public transport even before the Civil War (1861-1865). It was only in the 1950s, however, that blacks achieved the legal and social recognition that allowed them and anyone else who paid their fare to sit where they chose.
Signpost to Freedom: The 1953 Baton Rouge Bus Boycott re-creates the context of the inspiring black protest in Louisiana's capital city that won open-seating and showed again the success of organized, collective action. The 60-minute collage of period, black-and-white still photographs and video re-creations with voiceover and interspersed interviews with participants, witnesses, and scholars evokes the consciousness and emotions of the time with which Grammy-winning Baton Rouge blues artist Chris Thomas King's soulful
soundtrack harmonizes.
Signpost to Freedom makes clear the formidable resolve of ordinary black folk who demonstrated with their feet, hands, hearts, and whatever else they could wield that they would not without resistance fall in line with white supremacy. It shows their unassuming insistence on small, tangible change and
how unreasoning white recalcitrance redoubled black insistence. For as the 1953 protestors noted in chorus, their interest at the start was to get seats, not necessarily to end segregation. Black women wearied from domestic service in white households wanted to rest their sore feet at the end of the workday. They
were tired of being left standing by bus signs that declared "No More Blacks." Perhaps even more, they resented being left standing on buses with unoccupied seats.
Making up more than seventy percent of the riders on the Baton Rouge Bus Company, blacks in the winter, spring, and summer of 1953 showed they could be pushed only so far. Moving beyond resenting being abused by the bus system and its drivers, blacks declared, "we gonna stick together." The film projects some of the political maneuvering to reach a compromise on the city's public policy. It blinks, however, at the impotence of law by itself to reverse racist practices. An unemphasized but telling sequence recounts how white bus drivers flatly refused to abide by the compromise February 1953 city ordinance allowing first-come first-served seating, with whites starting in the front and blacks starting in the back. Had the compromise been put in force the bus boycott that arose in June 1953 might have been avoided. But on such small and not trivial things history often turns.
White bus drivers' insistence on their petty power cost the company $1,600 a day. "No black peoples ridin' that bus," as one protestor recalled, became commonplace. A new reality emerged. Blacks saw signs of hope and signs of change. The buses reflected a way of life, and the Baton Rouge bus boycott rejected the old way. It pointed in a new direction. It proved a bold, first step. As one participant noted, "we could see a change coming, and this was the beginning of it."
The more heralded Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama in 1955-1956 elevated to national prominence Mrs. Rosa Parks and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., but they only picked up on the direction the Reverend T. J. Jemison of Baton Rouge's Mount Carmel Baptist Church, the black-organized United Defense League, and the rank-and-file, real heroes of the 1953 Baton Rouge boycott had already pointed.
In giving voice to those who lived through and shaped the 1953 events, Signpost to Freedom compellingly reveals the essence of the Baton Rouge bus boycott as a people's movement. The skillful production captures and preserves a piece of history. It stumbles in places, as in mistaking the U.S. Supreme
Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) as establishing segregation. It stumbles also in over-striving to explain Baton Rouge, and more broadly Louisiana, as a special place where political philosophy or recent reforms or some sort of racial liberality somehow fated or favored it to be the origin of the 1950s bus boycott movement. Such straining detracts only slightly from the film's strength. It splendidly depicts a moment when ordinary people outside the official power structure came together in common cause and changed history.
