Helped spark Freedom Rides

Jailed over refusing to move from diner

Bruce Carver Boynton just wanted a cheeseburger and cup of tea. It was past 10 p.m., a week before Christmas in 1958, and his Trailways bus had stopped in Richmond, Va., for a short break. At the bus station, he saw what he later described as “a clinically clean white restaurant and an absolutely filthy Black café.”

Boynton was insulted. A precocious 21-year-old, he had graduated from high school at 14 and was now a third-year student at Howard University School of Law. Travelling from Washington to see his family in Selma, Ala., he sat in the whites-only section of the terminal.

He later told historian Frye Gaillard for the 2004 book Cradle of Freedom, that “the white waitress called the manager, who put his finger in my face” and told him “Move,” using a racial slur. “That crystallized what I was going to do,” he added. “I did not move.”

Boynton remained defiant even after he was sent to jail, convicted of misdemeanour trespassing and fined $10. He appealed the decision, leading to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that outlawed racial discrimination on buses, trains and other forms of interstate transportation, as well as at the terminals and restaurants that served passengers.

His actions paved the way for the Freedom Rides of 1961, said civil rights historian Raymond Arsenault, setting in motion a bloody and violent chain of events that galvanized media coverage of the civil rights movement, forced the Kennedy administration to take action and spurred interstate bus lines to finally desegregate after years of dragging their feet.

“It all comes together because of Bruce Boynton's bravery,” said Arsenault, author of the 2006 book Freedom Riders.

Boynton, who l ater worked as a civil rights lawyer in Tennessee and Alabama, died from cancer Nov. 23 at age 83, at a hospital in Montgomery, Ala.

The first Freedom Ride took place in May 1961. Groups of white and Black riders were enlisted to travel across the South and force the bus lines to integrate.

They were assaulted in South Carolina and nearly killed in Alabama, where a bus was firebombed and riders were beaten by a mob.

Five months later, a commission ruling integrated the buses and terminals.