January 20, 1953
Clarendon, South Carolina
Clarendon County, workplace safety, highway safety, Buses, African-Americans, South CarolinaThe certificate kept by the Clarendon Memorial Hospital records the death of Willie Lemon, an 18-year-old bus driver involved in a head-on collision on the highway near Jordan, South Carolina, on January 20, 1953. Vital information is recorded on Lemon. He was occupied as a school bus driver. He is listed as an unmarried, colored male from Manning, South Carolina, with no social security number. His...
January 20, 1953
Clarendon, South Carolina
African-Americans, Desegregation, Transportation, Segregation, Supreme Court, Children, Public Schools, Black History, Black Schools, South Carolina, Buses“W.H. Ridgeway, the 16-year-old driver of the white bus, sobbed in his hospital bed and told his mother over and over how sorry he was the wreck had happened” The Columbia State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper, reported this pitiful scene on January 21st, 1953, under the front-page headline, “Clarendon School Bus Crash Kills 2”. The State ran no pictures of the crash, but the details...
December 1, 1955 to December 20, 1956
Montgomery, Alabama
Government, African-Americans, Civil Rights, BusesOn February 23, 1956, more than two thousand African Americans filled the church from basement to balcony and overflowed into the street for a meeting to urge their followers to boycott the city’s buses. This meeting was the result of resistance efforts that began when Rose Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white man on Thursday, December 1, 1955. Months later...
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