Sarah Keys

September 1, 1953: In Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, Keys challenged the “separate but equal” in bus segregation before the Interstate Commerce Commission. Thirteen months earlier, Keys, a private in the Women’s Air Corps, had refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Carolina Trailways bus. Jailed and charged with disorderly conduct, she appealed and won before the ICC, which concluded “the assignment of seats on interstate buses, so designated as to imply the inherent inferiority of a traveler solely because of race or color, must be regarded as subjecting the traveler to unjust discrimination.”
The ruling was made public one week before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus.

BACKGROUND
64 MCC 769 (1955) is a landmark civil rights case in the United States in which the Interstate Commerce Commission, in response to a bus segregation complaint filed in 1953 by a Women's Army Corps (WAC) private named Sarah Louise Keys, broke with its historic adherence to the Plessy v. Fergusonseparate but equal doctrine and interpreted the non-discrimination language of the Interstate Commerce Act as banning the segregation of black passengers in buses traveling across state lines.

The case was filed on the eve of the explosion of the Civil Rights Movement by Washington, D.C., lawyer Julius Winfield Robertson and his partner, Dovey Johnson Roundtree, a former WAC whose experience with Jim Crow bus travel during her World War II Army recruiting days caused her to take on the case as a personal mission.[ Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, along with its companion train desegregation case, NAACP v. St. Louis-San Francisco Railway Company, 298 ICC 355 (1955), represents a milestone in the legal battle for civil rights. The November 1955 ruling, publicly announced six days before Rosa Parks' historic defiance of state Jim Crow laws on Montgomery buses, applied the United States Supreme Court's logic in Brown v. Board of Education (347 US 483 (1954) for the first time to the field of interstate transportation, and closed the legal loophole that private bus companies had long exploited to impose their own Jim Crow regulations on black interstate travelers. Keys v. Carolina Coach was the only explicit rejection ever made by either a court or a federal administrative body of the Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine (Plessy, 163 US 537 (1896)) in the field of bus travel across state lines. The ruling made legal history both at the time of its issuance and again in 1961, when Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy invoked it in his successful battle to end Jim Crow travel during the Freedom Riders' campaign.

The Keys case originated in an incident that occurred at a bus station in the North Carolina town of Roanoke Rapids shortly after midnight on August 1, 1952, when African American WAC private Sarah Keys was forced by a local bus driver to yield her seat in the front of the vehicle to a white Marine as she traveled homeward on furlough. At the time of the incident, Jim Crow laws entirely governed Southern bus travel, despite a 1946 Supreme Court ruling meant to put an end to the practice. That decision, Morgan v. Virginia (328 US 373 (1946)), had declared state Jim Crow laws inoperative on interstate buses on the basis that the imposition of widely varying statutes on black passengers moving across state lines generated multiple seat changes and thus created the kind of disorder and inconsistency forbidden by the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Southern carriers managed to dodge the Morgandecision, however, by passing segregation rules of their own, and those rules remained outside the purview of state and federal courts because they pertained to private businesses. In addition, the federal agency charged with regulating the carriers, the Interstate Commerce Commission, had historically interpreted the Interstate Commerce Act's discrimination ban as permitting separate accommodations for the races so long as they were equal. The ICC's separate but equal policy, upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in a 1950 railway dining car segregation case known as Henderson v. United States (399 US 816 (1950)), thus remained the norm in public transportation.

When Sarah Keys departed her WAC post in Fort Dix, New Jersey on the evening of July 31, 1952 bound for her hometown of Washington, North Carolina, she boarded an integrated bus in New Jersey and transferred without incident in Washington, D.C. to a Carolina Trailways vehicle, taking the fifth seat from the front in the white section. When her bus pulled into the Roanoke Rapids Trailways terminal, however, a new driver took the wheel and demanded that she comply with the carrier's Jim Crow regulation by moving to the so-called "colored section" in the back of the bus so that a white Marine could occupy her seat. Keys refused to move, whereupon the driver emptied the bus, directed the other passengers to another vehicle, and barred Keys from boarding it. An altercation ensued and Keys was arrested, charged with disorderly conduct, jailed incommunicado overnight, then convicted of the disorderly conduct charge and fined $25.

Unwilling to accept the verdict of the North Carolina lower court sustaining the charge, Keys and her father brought the matter to the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) office in Washington, D.C., headed by Howard University Law School professor Frank D. Reeves. Reeves referred Keys' case to his former law student Dovey Johnson Roundtree, whose World War II service in the Women's Army Corps (WAC) he believed would make her an ideal advocate for Sarah Keys.

Roundtree herself, as a recruiter for the WAC in the Deep South, had been evicted from a Miami, Florida bus in a 1943 incident that almost exactly paralleled Sarah Keys' experience. She and her law partner and mentor Julius Winfield Robertson undertook the case, filing a complaint against both the Northern carrier which had transported Keys to Washington, D.C., and the Southern carrier which had actually perpetrated the alleged wrong, Carolina Trailways. Though Robertson and Roundtree were but a year at the bar in the fall of 1952 when they undertook to represent Sarah Keys, they had been trained at Howard University Law School by such renowned civil rights lawyers as Thurgood Marshall, James Nabrit Jr., and George E.C. Hayes, and they were deeply involved in the movement to dismantle segregation in the courts. Writing years later in her autobiography about the unique bond she had with her client, Dovey Roundtree said, "It was as though I sat looking in a mirror, so strong was my sense of having walked where Sarah Keys had walked."

Sources:
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Barnes, Catherine A. "A Legal Breakthrough," pp. 86–107, in Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit, Columbia University Press, New York, NY 1983.
Brantley, Alice. "A Definite and Imperative Need for Legislation Against Discrimination," Amending Interstate Commerce Act (Segregation of Passengers) Hearings before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, United States House of Representatives, 83rd Congress, 2nd Session, May 12–14, 1954, Washington, DC.
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Greenberg, Milton. "Dovey Roundtree," in The GI Bill: The Law that Changed America, Lickle Publishing, Inc., New York, 1997, p. 103.
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Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company 64 MCC 769 (1955)
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