Abstract
This article looks at some of the practical, methodological, and disciplinary issues connected to comparative and transnational history through the lens of bus boycotts in South Africa and the United States in the 1950s. Comparative history by its very nature requires historians to transcend both the restrictive boundaries that the profession sometimes imposes as well as a fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to scholarship. Yet as the suggestive comparisons between boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the Transvaal in the mid-1950s show, such work can be rewarding in providing a transnational framework for understanding protest movements that transcend national borders. Catsam argues in the end of his article that “a deeper understanding of both [the American and South African] struggles together may well help us better to grasp the significance of each separately.”
Highlights
In early January 1957 South Africa’s Public Utility Transport Corporation (PUTCO) announced that it would be raising bus fares by one penny, from 4d to 5d
Derek Catsam is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. He is the writer and blogger on South African issues for the Foreign Policy Association, based in New York. He is working on a book on bus boycotts in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s
PUTCO officials estimated that Monday ridership was down to 2% of its normal levels, and by the 8th, the boycott was total, with no black riders in Alexandra.[2]
Summary
In early January 1957 South Africa’s Public Utility Transport Corporation (PUTCO) announced that it would be raising bus fares by one penny, from 4d to 5d. Campbell contributed to the conference discussed in footnote 12, above Africans to leave such a record, and his book, Black and White in the Southern States: A Study of the Race Problem in the United States from a South African Point of View was recently re-issued in the Southern Classics Series of the University of South Carolina Press with the ubiquitous Fredrickson providing an introduction.[17] Based on his 1914 travels to the South, Evans, one of the English-born South Africans who was present at the birth of the Union of South Africa in 1910, Evans’ book brings together his observations about the American racial situation and allows him to draw the conclusion that America was not the place to look to settle South Africa’s racial issues, as in the South of necessity blacks and whites lived amongst one another. With little fanfare the local officials did so, abolishing reserved seating as long as African Americans did not sit with or in front of any
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