This month, for the protest’s 50th anniversary, scholars will gather in Baton Rouge to celebrate the event’s role in history, weighing the boycott’s success. “At the final negotiation, Jim Crow was still alive,” says historian Doug Brinkley. Nevertheless, he says, “it opened up a kind of can of worms.” It showed blacks they could directly challenge whites. And King, who called Jemison for advice in 1955, used it as a tactical case study. “We seem to want to begin everything in 1954 with Brown v. Topeka when really the discontent of the people of Baton Rouge is the starting point,” Brinkley says. The boycott, he contends, belongs in textbooks and tour guides as the “John the Baptist of the civil-rights movement.”
So far, though, it has been little more than a footnote. “People in their 50s and 60s who have lived in Baton Rouge their whole lives have never heard about it,” says conference chair Marc Sternberg. Why not? Maybe because the protesters didn’t realize they’d started a revolution. “When I got people the seats to sit down, I was completely satisfied,” Jemison says. Huel Perkins, a lifelong member of Jemison’s church, says, “It was not about larger issues. It was a bus.” Yes, but a bus that rode the first leg of a long journey.
