The house cleaner who sparked a civil rights protest

1922–2021

Martha White had just finished another exhausting day working as a house cleaner in Baton Rouge when she stepped aboard a packed city bus on June 15, 1953. There was one seat left, in the “whites only” section at the front of the bus. “I was tired,” recalled White, an African-American. “I looked at the seat, and I sat down.” The white driver ordered her to get up; the then–31-year-old refused and was thrown off the vehicle, prompting Black residents of Louisiana’s capital to stage a bus boycott. That protest provided the framework for a more famous bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., two years later—one triggered by Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat to a white man, and which ended with a landmark Supreme Court ruling outlawing segregation on Alabama’s intrastate buses. “We can make the argument that none of the rest of that history happens without Martha White,” said Eugene Collins, president of the Baton Rouge NAACP.

Martha White

Born to sharecropper parents in Woodville, Miss., White moved to Baton Rouge in her early teens after the death of her mother, said The New York Times. The boycott she inspired hit the city bus company’s finances hard, because 80 percent of its riders were Black. “To stem the red ink,” the city struck an agreement with protest leaders to partially desegregate the buses, reducing the number of “whites only” seats. Some activists called the deal “a sellout” and said White’s case “should have been allowed to proceed through the courts.”

White “never stopped speaking out for social justice,” said the Baton Rouge Advocate. Today, several of her relatives work for the city’s public transit system. “Her bloodline,” said one of her nephews, John Denman, “is deep into that bus line.”