Red Emma’s

Before the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Rides, Black women passengers founded bus protest and made the right to a bus seat a symbol of the right to American democracy. Traveling back to the beginning of the bus industry in the 1920s, Policing Passengers tells the hidden history of this first generation of riders in the Jim Crow North and South. In response to the perceived threat of Black women’s mobility, white bus executives recruited drivers from law enforcement and implemented surveillance policies to violently police these riders.

But Black women passengers resisted the bus industry’s policing. They narrated their experiences to the Black press, wrote blistering letters to bus companies, notarized affidavits, and pressed the government to investigate. During the Great Migration and World War II, at least forty-three Black women passengers sued for segregation and bodily injury. Their lawsuits culminated in Morgan v. Virginia, the 1946 Supreme Court decision that enforcing segregation on interstate buses was unconstitutional. Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy’s innovative and meticulously researched book reveals that Black women passengers' activism transformed the bus industry and drafted the blueprints for the postwar Black freedom struggle.

Mary-Elizabeth Murphy, a native of Baltimore City, is a Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Eastern Michigan University. She teaches courses in U.S Women’s and Gender History, African American History, and contemporary U.S. history. She is the author of Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920-1945 (UNC, 2018) and Policing Passengers: Black Women and the Fight against Bus Violence (UNC, 2026). Her writing has also appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the California Western Law Review, Washington History, and the Washington Post.

Menika B. Dirkson is Assistant Professor of African American History at Morgan State University. She previously taught at Loyola University Maryland and Temple University. She has received grants from the Philadelphia Foundation and Thomas Jefferson University’s Arlen Specter Center for her research on race and policing following the Civil Rights Movement. Dirkson was born, raised, and lives in Philadelphia. Her monograph _Hope and Struggle in the Policed City: Black Criminalization and Resistance in Philadelphia _was published in 2024 with New York University Press.