This article is a part of our series From Lighthouses to Electric Chargers: A Presidential Series on Transportation Innovations

John F. Kennedy (JFK)

The presidency of John F. Kennedy (JFK) took place in the context of super-charged international relations: face-offs with the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev, the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco, and an underlying threat of nuclear annihilation. Simultaneously, pervasive injustice and violence faced by Black Americans at home was becoming impossible to ignore, specifically in the realm of transportation.

Discrimination on trains, streetcars, and buses and at their associated facilities was nothing new. Action (and inaction) by all levels of government (the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling in 1896) and challenges by both individuals and groups like the NAACP (the Montgomery, Alabama, local bus boycotts in 1955/1956) spanned decades.

In 1955, the now-defunct Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) — created to regulate railroads (and later trucks and buses) — ordered interstate bus companies to end segregation. In the case, Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, Sarah Keys had been arrested in Virginia after refusing to give up her seat on a Carolina Trailways bus. The ICC ruled that the Interstate Commerce Act prohibited segregation on interstate buses. This ruling was affirmed by the Supreme Court the following year.

But as with desegregation of schools (1954’s Brown vs. Board of Education), enforcement and implementation was another matter. Southern states and localities were prepared to resist these rulings any way they could.

JFK’s focus on foreign affairs, combined with his hesitancy to ruffle relationships with southern congressmen, left civil rights advocates frustrated by a lack of action for much of JFK’s term. However, JFK’s appointment of his brother Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) as Attorney General had a lasting impact. RFK “became the face of the administration on civil rights;” rather than advancing legislation, the administration began initiating Justice Department lawsuits in cases of violations of existing laws.

Pressure to Act: 1961 Freedom Rides

RFK’s Justice Department lawsuits were hardly making a dent in the nation’s systemic inequality. Even the 1960 Boynton Supreme Court ruling was hollow, as activists from the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) were determined to demonstrate via their May 1961 Freedom Rides. The Freedom Rides were the first “major domestic crisis” for JFK. During the initial ride planned from DC to New Orleans, riders were attacked by white mobs. The firebombing of a Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama made the dire situation clear. In Montgomery, RFK deployed federal marshals and a federal court order injunction prohibiting the Klan from interfering with interstate travel. Additional rides were escorted by the national guard, state highway patrol, FBI, and helicopters.

As lawyer Dovey Johnson Roundtree wrote in her autobiography: “It was in the end not simply the bloodshed or mass protest or fear that brought [the] promise of Keys [v. Carolina]. It was shame. The whole world looked, and was horrified, at the image of the freedom bus bursting into flames on a highway outside a little Alabama town called Anniston on May 14, 1961. And the whole world…saw the young men and women, Black and white, stepping out to the bus platforms in Birmingham and being met by mobs of cursing Klansmen armed with clubs and chains, being beaten and bloodied long before they even reach restaurants and soda fountains they were bent on integrating.”

Freedom Riders getting beaten in Birmingham, Alabama. This photo was reclaimed by the FBI from a local journalist who also was beaten and whose camera was smashed.

RFK and the ICC

On May 29, just two weeks after Anniston, RFK submitted a “petition for rulemaking” to the ICC. He cited the “flagrant violations” of Section 216(d) of the Interstate Commerce Act, which stated that “It shall be unlawful for any common carrier by motor vehicle engaged in interstate or foreign commerce…to subject any particular person… to any unjust discrimination or any undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage in any respect whatsoever.” The New York Times declared: “Action of Attorney General Is Inspired by Violence Over Freedom Rides.”

The ICC had already ruled that segregation of buses and waiting areas was unlawful in the 1955 Keys decision. Saying that “recent events…have disclosed a breakdown of guarantees of non-discriminatory transportation to passengers in interstate commerce,” RFK proposed new regulations to enforce this ruling

“Just as our Constitution is color blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens, so too is the Interstate Commerce Act. The time has come for this Commission…to declare unequivocally by regulation that a Negro passenger is free to travel the length and breadth of this country in the same manner as any other passenger.”

The ICC adopted RFK’s proposed rules in September 1961. All signs indicating segregation were to be removed effective November 1, replaced by signs prohibiting such practices. RFK’s Justice Department “actively monitored enforcement” and filed actions in federal court for violations.

RFK speaking to civil rights demonstrators in front of the Department of Justice in June 1963. Source: Library of Congress.

JFK’s Transportation Legacy

Working through his Attorney General and spurred by the Freedom Riders, JFK oversaw the desegregation of interstate travel. JFK’s thinking (and actions) on civil rights evolved over the course of his administration, spurred by unrelenting activists and the undeniable horrors and indignities that Black Americans faced in transportation and all realms of life. In June 1963, JFK addressed the nation after Governor George Walace denied two Black students enrollment at the University of Alabama, finally describing civil rights as a moral crisis. Though Lyndon Johnson ultimately signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, JFK’s administration lay the groundwork in Congress, up until JFK’s assassination in November 1963.

In a letter to JFK in January 1963, RFK summarized the Justice Department’s work on Civil Rights over the past year (1962). Regarding transportation, he declared that “segregation in interstate transportation has ceased to exist” because of the ICC’s actions. Tempering that statement, RFK went on to say that “1962 was a year of progress for the United States in the field of civil rights. This is not to say the problems are disappearing. They remain, and they remain difficult…Ugly incidents like the Mississippi riot may occur again. But we are accelerating our progress.”

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Holly Chase, AICP, is a transportation planner based in Brooklyn, NY. She has 13 years of experience as a transit consultant and now serves as a project manager at NYU’s C2SMARTER Center. 

This article is a part of our series From Lighthouses to Electric Chargers: A Presidential Series on Transportation Innovations