Mother Jones
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 children on people who are household names, and she wasn’t a household name. How do you become a household name if somebody [isn’t] going to write books about you? I had spent two years interviewing her and her family, and they were all excited about the idea [that] this story would finally become better known.
Of course, the reason her story wasn’t as well known as others is that shortly after she won her victory at the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1955, one week after it was announced publicly, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Montgomery bus boycott started, led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his first effort at being a Civil Rights leader. So everything got much more exciting after Sarah Keys Evans’ victory, [which] also was not enforced by the federal government until the Freedom Rides in 1961 caused such a disturbance, such bad publicity for the United States, that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered the federal government to finally enforce the Sarah Keys rule.
What have you heard from people in this process of uplifting the often overlooked stories of women in the Civil Rights movement like Evans and Roundtree?
People seem to be very, very supportive of it, and they all seem very surprised when they hear about it. In the back of the book, in the appendix, I include a list of other people whose stories have been overlooked for a long time. They’re very, very short, just [to] show that it was a lot of people—because, I think, maybe some people think that people of color just sort of submitted to this and [then] the Civil Rights Movement happened, but no. People were protesting about this all along, from the very beginning. More and more books are being written now that tell about these overlooked heroes. It took many foot soldiers, as we say in the book, to win this victory.
What sparked your interest in women’s military history?
When I was in college, that was the start of the women’s movement and the women’s magazines that started coming up. I remember one summer I read a book on women’s history, and I was astonished. I began to become aware that there was this thing called women’s history, and that women really were overlooked. I went to an all-girls’ college, the branch of Harvard that was called Radcliffe, and we actually were pretty badly treated for a while. During the time that I was there, there were no bathrooms in Harvard Yard that we could use. There was no place where we could have lunch, that kind of thing, and so I had a personal experience of being discriminated against as a woman.
Also I, just by chance, came across a book [with] articles about the [American] women pilots of World War II, the WASP pilots. My local public library got me many of the original interviews that these women had done, and put me in touch with some of the WASP women who were still alive, and I began interviewing them. I got really excited about trying to bring history to life in this way, by interviewing people and sharing their personal stories, more than just the bare facts of it.
That book was very well received, so I thought, well, why not write about all the women in the military? Because they’ve been serving ever since the Revolutionary War. I did a lot of research, trying to track down these women, and interviewing many of them, and interviewing many women who were currently serving. This was before this book came out in 2004 and that was before women were really much more integrated into the military. These women also saw themselves as being groundbreakers, and they were really eager to share their stories.
The first chapter of Riding Into History is a deep dive into the legal history behind segregation on public transportation. Something that struck me was how differently the 14th Amendment has been interpreted by different people and government institutions, and how it’s been used to both empower and disenfranchise communities of color.
Yes, indeed. I learned more about that when I was doing [a] book on the Plessy & Ferguson [Initiative]. I learned about this interpretation of the 14th Amendment, the back and forth on that when learning the legal history of that case. It didn’t give Congress specific permission to regulate individual people’s activities. So that’s how the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875 saying, well, the federal government didn’t have any right to regulate individual activities. Only states could do that.
Decades later, in 1946’s Morgan v. Virginia , the NAACP successfully argued that the Constitution’s Commerce Clause extended to regulate, and ban segregation on, interstate travel.
There had to be a uniform rule for all of travel. But because Morgan v. Virginia [only] said that no legislation could do that, bus companies just went and made their own segregation seating rules. The victory that [Evans] scored at the Interstate Commerce Commission, [after] Brown, ruled that neither state laws nor bus company rules could be applied in interstate bus rides or train rides that went from one state to another. From [1841], when Frederick Douglass was first thrown off of a train shortly after he escaped from enslavement in the north, ever since, it’s been back and forth, a seesaw of making a little progress and then slipping backwards. I hope we’re not slipping backwards again.
To that point, what would you say to young readers, and especially young women, who are fighting injustice in a moment where it feels as though our civil rights and liberties are under attack?
It does seem like they are under attack. I would just say that Sarah Keys Evans didn’t give many talks. [What] happened to her on that bus really impacted her for the rest of her life, made her a very cautious person, cautious about what she said in public. But she did give a talk to a high school [around 2019], and in that she said, “You must never stop fighting for your rights, because once you lose them, it’s very hard to get them back.” She said, “Each time you challenge a wrong, that news travels.” That’s what she told the students—and she told them, “I’m glad I didn’t give up. I’m glad I was able to help unlock another door of freedom.” That’s the message that she gave. So I think this is a story that can give people courage to think, well, yes, you can stand up for what’s right and what’s fair.
The middle section of the book focuses a lot on the history of education in the area and Sarah Keys Evans’ father’s efforts to build a school in her hometown. How did you make the decision to emphasize education in the book?
I think because there was such an up and down with education, too, after the Civil War. [Evans’] father went to a vocational school [made popular by Booker T. Washington after the Civil War], but then he heard from a friend of his, who had left Washington, North Carolina, earlier, that there [were] more opportunities [elsewhere, so] he went and lived in Washington, DC for a while, and had a chance to experience a different kind of education at Dunbar High School there, which was one of the first high schools for Black students in the United States. When he came back from having served in the Navy, he had become a Catholic.
[But] there was no Catholic church for Black people or for anybody in Washington, North Carolina. It had been destroyed during the Civil War and had never been rebuilt. A priest from [the] nearby town of New Bern would come periodically and hold mass at a rented room. This book called Washington and the Pamlico reported that [during] one such service in the early 1920s Sarah Keys Evans’ father said, “What can be done for my people?”
That started a whole conversation among the priests in New Bern who were thinking about starting a Black school. He helped find the land that they could use for that, and they started this school there, called the Mother of Mercy School, which taught the strict academic curriculum that was being taught up north and that was being taught in other parochial schools. It provided a sense of insulation from some of the affronts of the Jim Crow environment in that town. And so in a way, I think that gave [Evans] a sense of self confidence and that then carried on when she went into the military.
When desegregation happened and the schools were combined and Black students could go to the regular white high school in Washington, North Carolina, fewer people wanted to enroll in the Mother of Mercy School, and so it closed. A lot of the Black teachers and Black administrators lost their jobs so it’s a complicated story, but I thought it was a good story, because it shows the complexity of this whole topic. It wasn’t just yay, the Civil War ended, now everything was going to be all right. No, that was not what happened. [Or] yay, Brown v. Board of Education happened. [But] that didn’t solve every problem either. And so I think it’s good for people to understand the complexity of these issues and that people have to keep fighting for rights all the way through it, every step of the way.