One hundred years before Rosa Parks: Four women who desegregated transit

While the literature on transit segregation beginning with the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction is replete with evidence of Jim Crow in the South, precious little is written about earlier struggles to integrate transit in other parts of the country that formed a precedent for later efforts. Courageous women in New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia played significant roles in the legal activism that would predate Rosa Park's Montgomery moment in the century preceding her arrest for civil disobedience. This article seeks to situate the historical struggle for transit integration via the narratives of four female figures whose actions set the stage for transit integration and subsequent civil rights movements.