Winning a Wider Victory

This chapter discusses Rosa Parks’s arrest—one week after Sarah Keys’s ICC victory—and the Montgomery bus boycott, which involved local buses—not covered in the interstate Sarah Keys decision. Also attention-getting were 1960’s lunch counter sit-ins in North Carolina and elsewhere. A 1960 Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia extended the Sarah Keys ruling to bus station restaurants. That led to the very attention-getting 1961 Freedom Rides, with news coverage of police mistreatment of Freedom Riders that made the United States look bad, causing Attorney General Robert Kennedy on May 29, 1961, to order the ICC to enforce Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company. By June 1963, travel segregation had officially ended. Also helpful were civil rights laws of 1964 and 1965 and a North Carolina social justice project funded by the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, a group that later helped people learn about Sarah Keys Evans.