Buses in Civil Rights History

[WMAveteran]

The March 19, 2011 edition of THE NEW YORK TIMES carried an educational article on a man named Worcy Crawford who operated an African-American owned bus company in Birmingham, Alabama that transported African-Americans when white-owned companies would not. 


"But no one talks much about Worcy Crawford, who died in July at age 90, leaving a graveyard of decaying buses behind his house on the outskirts of Birmingham.       
His private coaches, all of them tended by Mr. Crawford almost until the day he died, do not have the panache of the city buses that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to ride. But they have significance nonetheless.       
With their cracked windows and rusting engines thick with brambles, they are remnants of something that was quite rare in the South: a bus company owned by an African-American.       
Mr. Crawford's work was simple. He kept a segregated population moving. Any Birmingham child who needed a ride to school, a football game or a Girl Scout outing during the Jim Crow era and beyond most likely rode one"

For more information go to www.nytimes.com/national and type "Birmingham Journal" in the search box.