Content provided in partnership with
Transportation Policies Leave Blacks on the Side of the Road
Crisis, The, Jan/Feb 2005 by Bullard, Robert D
Transportation is one of the most significant aspects of our lives, yet few people realize the historical civil rights struggle associated with it. In fact, the modern Civil Rights Movement has its roots in transportation. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Louisiana's segregated "White" and "Colored" seating on railroad cars. The case, Plessy v. Ferguson, ushered in the infamous doctrine of "separate but equal." Plessy not only codified apartheid in transportation facilities, but also served as the legal basis for racial segregation in education. The ruling was overturned in 1954 by the historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decison, in which the Supreme Court declared that the "doctrine of 'separate but equal'has no place."
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
Nevertheless, African Americans continued to struggle to end transportation discrimination on buses, trains and light rails. A year before the Brown decision, for example, Blacks in Baton Rouge, La., staged the nation's first successful bus boycott. Two years later, on Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of a Montgomery city bus to a White man. In so doing, Parks ignited what many consider the impetus for the modem Civil Rights Movement.
By the early 1960s, young "Freedom Riders" risked death by riding Greyhound buses into the Deep South, which was their way of fighting transportation segregation in interstate travel.
Today, the nation is less than a year away from the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. However, Rosa Parks would have a difficult time sitting in the front or back of a Montgomery bus. The city dismantled its public bus system, which served mostly Blacks and poor people, in 1997.
Ironically, the cuts in the Montgomery bus system were made at the same time that federal tax dollars boosted the construction of the region's extensive suburban highways.
Car Trouble
Lest anyone dismiss transportation as a tangential issue, consider that American households spend more on transportation than any other household expense - food, education, health care - except housing. On average, Americans spend 19 cents out of every dollar earned on transportation expenses. But the nation's poorest families spend nearly 40 percent of their take-home pay on transportation, according to the 2003 report "Moving to Equity: Addressing Inequitable Effects of Transportation Policies on Minorities," by the Harvard Civil Rights Project and the Center for Community Change. Households that earned less than $20,000 saw their transportation expenses increase by 36.5 percent or more between 1992 and 2000. On the other hand, households with incomes of $70,000 and higher only spent 16.8 percent more on transportation than they did in 1992.
The private automobile is still the dominant travel mode for every segment of the American population. Nationally, only 7 percent of White households do not own a car, compared with 13 percent of Asian American households, 17 percent of Latino households and 24 percent of African American households. Nevertheless, only 20 percent of all surface transportation funding nationwide is earmarked for public transportation, while 80 percent is earmarked for highways.
This funding allocation has left Blacks on the side of the road. African Americans are almost six times as likely as Whites to use public transit to get around. In fact, African Americans and Latinos comprise a significant portion of all mass transil users (62 percent of bus riders, 32 percent of subway riders and 29 percent of commuter rail riders).
Help Wanted
The lack of car ownership and inadequate public transit service in many urban areas exacerbate social, economic and racial isolation, especially for low-income African Americans, who already have limited transportation options.
A 2000 study by scholar Michael Stoll of the University of California, Los Angeles, found that no other group in the United States was more physically isolated from jobs than African Americans. Stoll's research revealed that more than 50 percent of Blacks would have to relocate to achieve an even distribution of Blacks relative to jobs; the comparable figures for Whites are 20 to 24 percentage points lower.
"Given the difficulties of reverse commuting to suburbs in many metropolitan areas, especially by public transit, coupled with the fact that high proportions of Blacks do not own cars, such spatial mismatch disconnects Blacks from many jobs for which they may be suited, thereby increasing their employment difficulties," wrote Stoll in his study, titled "Modest Progress: The Narrowing Spatial Mismatch Between Blacks and Jobs in the 1990s."
Today, more and more corporations are leaving central cities and locating to suburbs. A 2000 Brookings Institution study, "Office Sprawl: The Evolving Geography of Business," reported the suburban share of metropolitan office space at 69.5 percent in Detroit, 65.8 percent in Atlanta, 57.7 percent in Washington, D.C., 57.4 percent in Miami and 55.2 percent in Philadelphia. But getting to many suburban job centers without a car is next to impossible.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Technology
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »