This Little-Known Civil Rights Activist Refused to Give Up His Bus Seat Four Years Before Rosa Parks Did

In May 1951, William “W.R.” Saxon stepped aboard a Smoky Mountain Stages Inc. bus in Atlanta with his ticket grasped tightly in his hand. Bound for his home in the Southside neighborhood of Asheville, North Carolina, the Black insurance agent was no stranger to the pervasive Jim Crow discrimination of his time. But this seemingly routine ride turned into a pivotal moment when Saxon refused to move to the back of the segregated interstate bus—a full four years before Rosa Parks’ similar but far more famous act of civil disobedience. It’s unknown if Saxon’s case directly inspired later Black activists like Parks, but the lawsuit he subsequently filed against the bus company brought heightened media scrutiny and public awareness of civil rights issues in the South.

Who was W.R. Saxon?

Born in 1878 in Laurens, South Carolina, Saxon was the son of George and Caroline Saxon. Not much is known about his early life, but records indicate that he co-founded a local newspaper around 1901 and worked for the Laurens School District before moving to Asheville in the late 1920s.

Saxon’s life was marked by his dedication to social justice and equality. He was a Seventh-day Adventist, a traveling lecturer on public health issues and an insurance agent for the National Accident and Health Insurance Company. He was also active in the leadership of both the Asheville and statewide chapters of the NAACP.

The 1951 bus ride wasn’t Saxon’s first experience fighting racist policies. Through his status as a prominent member of the Black community, Saxon was involved in a range of civil rights work, including advocating for voting rights. When Buncombe County officials denied three Black Asheville residents the right to register to vote in 1941, Saxon notarized the affidavits detailing the incident. As the Asheville Citizen-Times reported that May, the affidavits’ authors argued that Black voters “were forced to meet tests that were not required of white voters … in violation of their constitutional rights.”

Saxon’s bus ride

In the early 1950s, segregation laws mandated that African Americans in the Jim Crow South sit at the back of the bus. When Saxon boarded his bus in May 1951, he sat in the third seat from the rear. Soon, another passenger told the bus driver to move Saxon “or there would be trouble,” per the Asheville Citizen-Times. The driver complied, but Saxon refused to relocate, contending that “he was comfortable in his seat, that he did not desire to move and that he was a passenger in interstate commerce,” the newspaper reported. Saxon seemed well aware of the groundbreaking 1946 case Morgan v. Virginia, in which the United States Supreme Court had ruled that segregated interstate bus travel violated the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. Yet racial norms in Georgia and North Carolina prevailed, maintaining de facto segregation on buses.

A company dispatcher called in by the driver also asked Saxon to change seats, but he replied that when he’d bought the ticket, he wasn’t told where he would have to sit. Despite the calls for him to move, Saxon remained in his seat. He explained that there were no empty seats at the back of the bus, aside from a long seat across the rear that did not recline. But Saxon’s resistance was short-lived. After a police officer intervened, threatening to remove him from the bus, Saxon reluctantly gave in, settling into the uncomfortable back seat for the hourslong ride. His wife was ill and needed him at home, and he did not want to become entangled with the law in the city of Atlanta.

The lawsuit

One month after his show of defiance, on June 18, 1951, Saxon filed a lawsuit against Smoky Mountain Stages Inc. He sought $15,000 (around $180,000 today) in damages, split between $10,000 for the discrimination he’d faced because he was Black and $5,000 for the discomfort, mental suffering, and humiliation he’d experienced.

The trial was not just a personal battle but also a source of upliftment for Asheville’s African American residents. Matthew Bacoate Jr., a local civil rights icon who spearheaded the city’s first economic development initiative in 1968, was in his early 20s at the time of the trial. Speaking with Smithsonian magazine, Bacoate recalls “a sense of pride in the Negro community because of the way Mr. Saxon stood his ground.”

The courtroom was a battleground of conflicting ideologies, with Saxon’s steadfast resolve pitted against the entrenched norms of segregation. R.R. Williams Sr., the attorney for the bus company, accused Saxon of being a troublemaker and cautioned the jury that his lawsuit was an attempt to dismantle segregation more broadly. If a verdict were returned in the plaintiff’s favor, Williams argued, segregation would soon end.

Henry Fisher, the lawyer representing Saxon, disputed the bus company’s portrayal of his client, noting that his septuagenarian client had presented no evidence of troublemaking behavior over the course of his life. Fisher also argued that if Saxon had been trying to make a test of segregation, he would have sat at the front of the bus rather than toward the back. The trial drew considerable public attention, with both local and national media covering the proceedings.

The verdict and aftermath

The deeply rooted racial biases of the era significantly influenced the trial’s outcome. On September 10, 1952, a Buncombe County Superior Court jury ruled in the bus company’s favor. Interestingly, the Asheville Citizen-Times reported, the jury “was not asked to find first whether or not the plaintiff had been discriminated against,” as was typical in such cases. Instead, the group considered whether Saxon had been “injured and damaged by the defendant” as a result of being denied the same equal rights and facilities as other passengers on the bus.

Even though the verdict upheld segregation laws, it reinforced the momentum of the nascent civil rights movement and underscored the pervasive injustices that needed to be addressed. Later acts of defiance mirrored Saxon’s: In August 1952, for example, Women’s Army Corps Private Sarah Keys Evans refused to give up her seat on an interstate charter bus, launching a court case that would be decided by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Other activists—like 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who didn’t yield her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in March 1955, as well as Mary Louise Smith-Ware, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald and Jeanatta Reese, Colvin’s fellow plaintiffs in the federal court case Browder v. Gayle—further highlighted discriminatory practices involving buses. Following these incidents, Parks’ iconic act of resistance on December 1, 1955, sparked the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott, culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1956 ruling in the Browder case, which declared bus segregation in Alabama unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.

In the years after his lawsuit, Saxon remained a committed champion for civil rights. In 1953, he advocated for Asheville’s city council to increase funding for Walton Street Park, which housed the city’s only recreational pool for Black residents. In the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned legal segregation in the U.S., Asheville officials strategically postponed the desegregation of public pools, closing all but two—a traditionally whites-only pool at Malvern Hills and Walton Street Park—and thereby upholding segregation in all but name.

Saxon lived to see the Civil Rights Act adopted on July 2, 1964, just over 60 years ago. This groundbreaking legislation, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, including on public transportation.

Saxon died shortly after, on July 29, 1964, at the age of 86.

Six decades later, the city of Asheville’s new Black Cultural Heritage Trail is commemorating his legacy as a notable figure in the local civil rights movement. Al Whitesides, the first Black Buncombe County commissioner, is also celebrated along the trail. As he tells Smithsonian, the initiative is significant “because we can finally tell the stories of African Americans who have made positive contributions to the development of Asheville.

Taryn White | READ MORE

Taryn White is a Washington, D.C.-based travel writer.