The Black Veteran Who Desegregated Interstate Buses |
In the summer of 1952, 23-year-old Sarah Keys (later Sarah Keys Evans) was making her first trip home from the Army hospital where she worked in Trenton, New Jersey, to North Carolina since joining the Women’s Army Corps the year before. Awoken around midnight, the private first class was ordered to give up her seat to a white Marine. When she refused, Evans was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. She spent the night pacing around a dirty jail cell in her uniform and high-heeled shoes before paying $25 (around $300 in today’s dollars) for her release in the morning. Evans had never even participated in a civil rights protest, but she would spend the next three years—with the support of her father and the trailblazing Black attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree—fighting for transportation equality.
Evans and Roundtree brought her case to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the regulatory agency that oversaw interstate travel at the time. After an initial defeat, Evans’ legal team appealed, using the momentum from the Supreme Court’s recent unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. A year later, in 1955—days before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus in Alabama—the ICC ruled in Evans’ favor, marking the first time that an executive branch institution outside the military rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine of 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson. But it would take several more years of direct action for the federal government to finally enforce the ICC’s decision.
In the early aughts, while researching a book on American women in the military, author Amy Nathan stumbled upon this now little-known piece of civil rights history. Nathan interviewed Evans, self-publishing a children’s book about her two years later. They remained friends and collaborators until Evans passed away in 2023. In 2020, nearly 70 years after Evans’ arrest, Roanoke Rapids installed a series of murals about the veteran’s fight for justice, which Evans told a Time reporter she saw as a tribute to all the overlooked women who “kept the spark going” during the Civil Rights Movement.
“That’s why we decided to write this book, to really place her story within the whole context of the struggle—from the early 1800s onward—to end segregation on public transportation,” Nathan told me about Riding Into History, an account of Evans’ story published by Duke University Press.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about the experience of trying to get Sarah Keys’ story out there. I know you first wrote a book about her for younger readers in 2006: what was the process like? What obstacles did you encounter?
Oh, plenty of obstacles. I just thought this was an original story, and it was a really important story. So I naively thought, of course I’d find somebody who wanted to do it. But I have subsequently learned, and I was told this a couple of times by people in publishing, that they only do books for........