Alabama’s Venerable Bus System at Crossroads

Samuel Jackson helped bring the Montgomery bus system to a halt as a young foot soldier in the 1955 bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement.

Today, Jackson is the customer service supervisor for the Montgomery Area Transit System, and he wishes the buses were running more often.

But the bus system that was so important to everyday life and changing times 46 years ago is now just a shadow of its former self, slowed almost to a halt. That has left many of the same group of people who participated in the boycott--mostly poor blacks without a car--with few ways to get around.

“The bus was an essential,” Jackson recalled. “You had to have it, just like water.”

In 1955, when Jackson was a junior in high school, Montgomery’s racially segregated buses--whites in front, blacks to the rear--carried 30,000 to 40,000 blacks each day. By 1968, when Jackson became a bus driver and blacks and whites had come back to the buses after years of turmoil, the buses averaged about 10,000 riders of all races each day.

In recent years that number dropped below 1,000. After an overhaul effort in the last year, ridership now hovers around 1,200 a day.

Most of the faces on downtown buses are still black and poor, as Rosa Parks was in Alabama’s segregated capital when she refused to give up her seat on Dec. 1, 1955. That simple act ignited the boycott that led to a federal court ruling against segregation in public transportation. The boycott also brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a national spotlight.

The challenges for those needing bus rides now are different.

“We’re telling people to get off welfare and get to work, but we’re not giving people the infrastructure to do it,” said Jon Broadway, a founding member of the Montgomery Transportation Coalition, which advocates more buses and bus routes.

In the last year and a half, bus service has started to show increases in ridership, said Tim Omick, general manager for MATS and the company contracted by the city to run transportation, First Transit.

Nine regular routes run for $1 a ride, and the city has said it will support a mass transit system, Omick said. In 1955, as many as 18 bus routes operated, historians and longtime Montgomery residents said.