Avoiding "Jim Crow" - Negotiating separate and equal on Florida's railroads and streetcars and the progressive era origins of the modern civil rights movement

The fight against discrimination on public transportation in Florida at the turn of the twentieth century helped to transform black leaders from nineteenth century activists into modern civil rights protesters. Although the movements at the turn of the century and the ones that dominated the South after World War II were not directly connected through a continuum of leadership and institutions, activists in the early twentieth century laid the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the modern civil rights movements. These important protests coincided with increased migration and urbanization of blacks and poor whites in Florida, but also provided that space where the merging of disparate groups of black leaders could communicate and subordinate gender and class demands to race.