As I review my life as a colored girl, riding the Trailways bus on a weekly basis was my most uncomfortable and anxiety producing experience. So, why was I riding the bus on a weekly basis?
My mother, Bernice, wanted me to have the full school experience, academics and extra-curricular activities. But because of the schedule they were denied to bus riders.
Mother made a simple request to the school board at the end of the 1956 school year. She asked that I receive monies for room and board to live with my Aunt Ruth, a teacher at Booker High School in Sarasota. To satisfy my mother, who was an active member of the NAACP, and to quell any intention that my mother might bring up the 1954 Brown vs. The Board of Education decision, they quickly placed two portables at Baker Academy for 7th and 8th graders. Several years later, a new Baker Academy was built.
But I never attended Baker in the portables or the new school. Instead, from 7th through 12th grade, I attended Booker High School in Sarasota. Most Fridays, I took the 6:30 evening bus to Punta Gorda, unless I wished to stay over for a football game or was able to get a ride home. I was saved from the Sunday bus ride to Sarasota by driving back with the pastor of my grandmother’s church.
“Back of the bus,” “back seat,” meant headache or nausea from the exhaust for those six years. Each week, I stood at the back of the line with other colored to wait to board, then with anxiety in my heart and mind, I hoped that the last two rows of seats before the back seat would not be taken by whites. Sometimes I was lucky; other times, not. I don’t remember ever having to stand up for the fifty-mile trip, but the lack of personal space was most depressing and uncomfortable. Some sixty or so years later, I am still uncomfortable taking a bus.
The view that we were one undeserving entity, not separate individuals, whose discomfort and the encroachment of our personal space was immaterial. The backseat of the bus to this colored girl was intended as a disregard for my humanity.
"In my life, I have found myself as a colored, a negro, a Black, an African American, and a person of color. This is my reflection as a colored girl." This phrase opens each essay in the series “Reflections of a Colored Girl” from Martha R. Bireda, Ph.D. being aired on WGCU FM. Dr. Bireda is a writer, lecturer, and living history performer with over 30 years' experience as a lecturer, consultant and trainer for issues related to race, class, and gender, working with educators, law enforcement, and business, and civic leaders. She also is director of the Blanchard House Museum of African American History and Culture of Charlotte County, in Punta Gorda, Florida. Bireda was born in Southwest Florida in 1945 but spent the first 10 years of her life in a small town in Western Virginia. Her family then moved back to Punta Gorda, where they have deep roots. This is one essay in her series.
