A Trailways bus pulled into a station in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 24, 1961. A WSB-TV news clip shows officers escorting two Black women to the back of a police van. They were being arrested for riding the bus.
One of the women was New Orleans native Julia Aaron Humbles.
Humbles “was among a group of young people from New Orleans that staged sit-ins, challenged laws on buses traveling across the south, and even spent time behind bars in several states for their actions,” WGNO-TV states.
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in Chicago in 1942, a year before Humbles was born. According to 64 Parishes, the organization “pioneered nonviolent ‘sit-down’ campaigns in Chicago and other northern cities to protest racial segregation in public facilities.” It launched Freedom Rides in 1961 to test the Supreme Court decision declaring that segregated bus terminals and other interstate travel facilities were unconstitutional.
“Black women, including Doris Jean Castle, her sister Oretha and Julia Aaron Humbles, played key roles in CORE’s Louisiana chapters,” 64 Parishes states, “and frequently took on important leadership positions.”
Humbles was barely 18 when she was selected to be on the first Freedom Ride bus, which a white mob firebombed in Alabama. Humbles missed the ride, because she had been arrested for picketing outside segregated stores on Canal Street.
Humbles, who died in 2016, eventually rode on the third bus. She was on a mission to “remove the signs of human injustice from our society.”
“I was the kid that would move up the ‘colored’ sign on the buses (marking where Black riders could sit),” she said in the Advocate. “I would use the white restroom or water fountain. If I got caught, I would say flippantly, ‘I just wanted to taste that white water!’ and I’d run.”
For more tales from New Orleans history, visit the Back in the Day archives.
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