Soldiers and Buses

• Published date: 01 April 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368715573133
• Date: 01 April 2015
• Author: Margaret Burnham
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Soldiers and Buses:

All Aboard

Margaret Burnham

1

Abstract

The fieldof retrospective justicehas spawned interestingscholarship on the complexities

of redress for histories of slavery andJim Crow, including reparation, official apologies,

judicialremedies, and truth commissions. Althoughnumerous studies of Jim Crowin the

South have captured the social, economic, and political dynamics of the practice, in

the realm of retrospective justice, adequate attention has not yet been given to the

massive failure of criminal law enforcement agencies, state and federal, to respond to

homicidal racial violence. Still underexplored are the patterns and prevalence of the

violence, the specifics of federal/state collaboration, and the character of community

resistance. This essay is based on a larger project that examines these questions; the

project uses legal case studies to develop a comprehensiveand q ualitativelyrich account of

racial homicides in the 1930s and 1940s. and to engage affected communities in restorative

justice practices. This particular study describes a range of harms, with a particular focus

on homicide, experienced by soldiers and veterans in their encounters with Jim Crow

transportation in the World War II era, and it argues that the incidence of violence was

sufficiently acute and widespread so as to warrant current remedial measures, including

official investigation and appropriate acknowledgment of government failures.

Keywords

Racial violence, retrospective justice, Jim Crow law enforcement, federalism, policing,

WW II

Yes, I know I’m in the South. I’m in the South because the Army brought me here to fight

your war for you. It’s not my fight, the things I’m fighting for don’t exist for me or any

Negro. Poor [white people] like you have rights, but I haven’t but by God I’m wearing

Uncle Sam’s uniform. I’ll make you respect it and treat me like any other soldier. If you

were any part of a man you’d be in uniform yourself.

Cpl Fred Edwards to store cashier, Camp Shelby, MS, 1942

(Hutchinson, 2011, p. 144)

1

Northeastern University School of Law, Boston, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Margaret Burnham, Northeastern University Law School, 400 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA 02115, USA.

Email: m.burnham@neu.edu

Race and Justice

2015, Vol. 5(2) 91-113

ªThe Author(s) 2015

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DOI: 10.1177/2153368715573133

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There is still of course the occasional gripe from Negro [soldiers] who are compelled

to occupy rear seats in the city buses.

Major Frank Sakser, Tallahassee, FL, 1944

Sergeant Foster [murdered by a Little Rock police officer] was my son. However, I am

not asking more for him than I want for any American soldier, and that is, Mr. Pre-

sident ... for you to let the proper authorities openly know your attitude, which I know

is justice ... Dear President, I have an abiding faith in you ... Yours with bowed heart.

Thomas J. Foster to Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

Philadelphia, PA, 1943

There have been numerous killings of Negro soldiers by civilians and civilian

police ... We are not aware of a single instance of prosecution or of any steps being

taken by the Federal Government to either punish the guilty parties or to prevent the

recurrence of these crimes against the uniform of the United States Army.

Thurgood Marshall to Assistant Attorney General Tom C. Clark,

New York, NY, 1944

Where I just came from [overseas] us colored had all the seat room we wanted. We sat

anywhere we wanted to.

Marine Veteran Timothy Hood, killed by motorman and chief of police

for moving the Color Board, Birmingham, AL, 1946

Introduction

Hilliard Brooks got on a bus in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, in 1950. He entered

through the front door, dropped his seven cents in the box, and looked for a seat in the

rear, ignoring the custom that had been in place since buses were first introduced in the

city in the 1920s. Although there were few people on the bus, the driver ordered

Brooks, a navy veteran, to leave the bus and reenter through the rear door. Consigned

to the back seats, Black passengers were not allowed to walk through the White

section in the front of the bus, although they had to pay at the front door. On this

particular afternoon, a White teenager, Jane Ann Thompson, traveling alone, sat in the

front, and perhaps the driver did not want Brooks to walk near her as he headed toward

the back of the bus. Brooks hesitated for a minute, then disobeyed the driver and

proceeded to the rear. Moments later, he lay mortally wounded on the street, killed by

a police officer whose bullet also hit two bystanders. No one was ever prosecuted.

Brooks’ death came 5 years before Rosa Parks refused to follow the orders of a

different Montgomery bus driver and 6 years after Booker Spicely was shot to death

for a similar offence in Durham, North Carolina. Private Spicely, an army truck driver

in a colored unit at Camp Butner, boarded a Durham city bus on a Saturday afternoon

in 1944, which was headed toward the base. Having enjoyed a pleasant day off,

Spicely’s good mood turned dark when the bus operator asked him to give up his seat

in the rear of the crowded bus for a passenger who boarded after him, a White soldier

92 Race and Justice 5(2)