'The Army's Rosa Parks': Amy Nathan on Sarah Keys Evans and Riding Into History

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Civics and Coffee, a history podcast. The show all about United States history, delivered to you and the time it takes to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. I'm your host, Alicia, a historian trained in United States history with a passion for telling both the known and unknown parts of America's past. So grab your coffee and get ready for some bite-sized history. Hey everyone, welcome back. Sitting down with me this week is author Amy Nathan to discuss her research into a woman whose early fight for civil rights is unknown to many. I hope you enjoy my conversation about Sarah Keyes Evans and the book Writing into History. Hello everyone. Joining me today is Amy Nathan. She is an author of several books centered on the civil rights movement, including her most recent Writing into History, the surprising story of Sarah Keyes Evans, and the fight to desegregate bus travel, which will be the focus of our conversation today. Welcome, Amy. Hi. So let's dive right on in. Who was Sarah Keyes Evans and how did you come to writing this history?

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Right, well, Sarah Keyes Evans is a little-known civil rights hero. I hope this book will change that. She was born in 1929. It's a small town of Washington, North Carolina. And after she graduated from high school, she moved to New Jersey and joined the Women's Army Corps and was a member of the Women's Army Corps stationed at that time in 1952 at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And she had just been promoted to become a private first class and was going to take her first trip home to North Carolina since joining the military. She had done several since before then. And it was supposed to be like a celebratory travel home. Here she was making her way as a young woman, age 23, just been promoted to private first class. And so she took this long bus trip home to Washington, North Carolina. And when the bus arrived in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, which is just over the Virginia border, she was told to move to the back of the bus so a white Marine could have her seat. But she didn't quite understand what was going on. But before long, she was arrested, spent the night in jail, and had to pay a $25 fine to get out of jail. She was charged with disorderly conduct, although she had not been disorderly at all. So with the help of her father and lawyer Debbie Johnson Roundtree, she wound up eventually filing a legal complaint at the Interstate Commerce Commission. And in 1955, she won. She won a victory, which said that segregation was now forbidden on interstate buses. And on that same day in 1955, a decision was reached on train travel, which the Inter Interstate Commerce Commission also said was illegal. Unfortunately, her decision was not enforced until 1961 when the freedom rides happened. And the freedom rides of young people taking bus trips throughout the South to try to make a segregation end in transportation. That caused such bad publicity for the United States government, which was in a battle then to show that democracy was better than communism. And so in 1961, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Sr. ordered the federal government to finally enforce the Sarah Keys victory at the ICC and the companion train order from the ICC, and that wound up leading to the end of segregation in the United States and transportation in 1963. So that's why she was famous. Now I learned about her not from taking history classes at college or in all the reading I had done because she was not mentioned in any of the major books on civil rights history. So in 2001, I was finishing up work on a book on women in the military for National Geographic, a book for young readers. And I went to the newly opened Military Women's Memorial, which is located at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. And there on the wall was a plaque talking about the victory won by these two former members of the Women's Army Corps. The Military Women's Memorial had started in 1997. And there was this plaque on the wall in 2000. It had been installed earlier, but I didn't see it until 2001. And I thought, well, this was sort of really amazing story. These two women winning this victory that I had never heard about. And also the uh the founder of the Military Women's Memorial liked to call Sarah Keyes the Army's Rosa Parks, because their story was not as well known or as well publicized in history books as what Rosa Parks had accomplished, which Rosa Parks did in Montgomery, Alabama, happened one week after the Sarah Keyes Evans uh legal victory was announced publicly. So I thought that this should be a story that people learned about too. And so the Women's Memorial agreed with me and they put me in touch with Sarah Keyes Evans. That was her name after she married in 1958. Sarah Keyes was her maiden name. Sarah Keyes Evans was her married name. And in 2004, we had our first telephone conversation. Now she made me promise that she would she would talk to me on the phone and I could interview her, but I had to show her everything I, you know, transcribed about the interview, and anything that I would write about her had to meet her approval for accuracy. She was very firm about everything being very accurate. And I said, Well, I am also very committed to accuracy. And so uh we had that in common. And I interviewed her for the first time in uh January of 2004 and um continued interviewing her or meeting with her in person or having conversations with her um until um until her death in 2023. So it was a long, a long relationship, and uh I learned a lot talking to her.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Well, and it was uh a joint effort and a labor of love a little bit as as it comes through in the book, at least. And when readers pick up the book, they will they will notice that in addition to the story of Evans, it will also provide the history of black Americans in the South. So, what was the motivation behind including this context and and what do you hope it adds for readers?

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Yes, well, I I think it is important to see that what she did was part of this long, long struggle to end segregation in transportation, which was an especially insulting form of segregation, because it was an everyday occurrence. If you needed to take a uh trolley or a uh bus to get to work or to get to where you had to get and to have to face discrimination on a daily basis, like that was a particularly, you know, um harmful kind of segregation, as all segregation was, of course, harmful. But I wanted to show the history to point out how deeply entrenched those attitudes of segregation and discrimination were in American history and how very difficult it was to end them. And so it took from the way early 1800s, from the stagecoach era. Um, touch on that as well. Luckily, with the help of a lot of wonderful books that I read and articles that that helped me learn about that history myself. Stagecoaches wouldn't uh take black writers, or if they did, they had to hang on from the outside of the coach. And Frederick Douglass was one of the uh very famous early example of someone who was tossed off of a train in Massachusetts, um, just three years in 1841, three years after he had escaped from slavery in Maryland. And that led quickly thereafter to the end of transportation segregation in Massachusetts, but it continued elsewhere, and it was a long, long struggle. So I wanted that to get across, and that the victory was what happened with Sarah Keys was that there was a combination of strategies in her presentation, and that was exampled in other historical examples along the way, that it required a legal victory, but also it required the actions of protesters causing disturbance to bring attention to the crisis. And so that's what solved it with finally Attorney General Kennedy ordering the government to enforce that legal decision. So that happened in the one of the very first examples that I give in the book of a similar thing happening in New York City. In 1850, uh, I I a young woman was thrown off of a streetcar. She won a legal victory, but that ended the segregation in her streetcar line, but not in all the many other streetcar lines in New York City. And it took several years after that, and with many people protesting, getting arrested finally for that to end almost 10 years later. So it was the same process, kept repeating over and over again. So things got a little better after the end of the Civil War, the beginning of Reconstruction with all these very hopeful um amendments to the United States Constitution. But once uh Reconstruction ended in the 1870s, when uh federal troops were removed from the South and white supremacist governments took control again in southern states, um transportation segregation roared back, and it took many, many people to um to end it. In the back of the book, in the book itself, I give a lot of examples of other people who had the courage to stand up against this. But also in the back of the book, there's an appendix where I list many other unsung heroes in the fight against transportation segregation. I hope this will give people the idea that this was a dictionary that was hard to win and that we should really try to make sure that we don't slip back again.

unknown 10:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

It was a great framing and a great context. I I thought it was a great way for anybody who was maybe not as familiar with the long struggle for civil rights and the long history of the struggle for for black freedom. I thought it was a well-framed context. So well done.

SPEAKER_01 10:58

Well, thank you. Well, because it was it was an education for me too. You know, I and what was really helpful is that when you do an academic public, this book was published by Duke University Press, and they have anonymous reviewers who review it along the way. And they gave wonderful, I I think they were committed to this story too. And they gave me wonderful. Hey, did you know about this article? Did you know? And so I all along the way of writing this, I kept, wow, that's amazing. I didn't know that. And so I kept, I'm sure the people I'm reading the book wouldn't know those things either. So this was just a way to try to spread this history a little more widely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:33

Well, and so there are hints from Keys' background that kind of help explain why she was able to push for change. So can you share a little bit about her backstory and and maybe some of the lessons she carried into her adult life that helped her maintain her focus in her quests for civil rights?

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Well, her father was very important in all of this. He was a really quite remarkable man. He grew up and he he he went to high school in this small town of Washington, North Carolina, which was a vocational high school. And at that time, there was this thought that vocational education was the only kind of education that uh should be made available to black people in the South. But he uh had heard of some friends who had gone to the other Washington, Washington, D.C. And so as a teenager, without getting permission from his parents, he moved to Washington, D.C. for a few years. And while he was there, he had a chance to experience a different kind of education at Dunbar High School, which was uh, I think it was the first black high school in the United States. And um, it used a very strict academic type education, like the education that was taught in in northern states. And so uh when he returned to his hometown after uh serving in the Navy during World War I, he and also while he was away, he had become a Catholic, he worked with the Archdiocese to create an academic-focused parochial school in his hometown called the Mother of Mercy School. And it uh started in 1927, two years before Sara Keys was born. And um it taught a strict um academic curriculum as was taught in um parochial schools at that time everywhere. And uh it offered uh options that were not available then in the public school for black students in that town, although that school did later enrich its curriculum also. But at the time that Sarah Keys started in that school, it it didn't. And it taught, it had a science lab, it had a library at a time when the local library was not open to black residents of Washington, North Carolina. Um it taught music, it um it also provided a certain insul insulation for her from some of the um more um disturbing aspects of segregation in the town, like the local movie theater. Black people had to sit in the balcony, the better seats downstairs are only for white people. And uh so her school showed movies during uh during holidays, and everybody could sit together. And her band and her her, she she played French horn, and her school band would uh play for the public black high school, which didn't have music at that time, and it performed in concerts in in the area, and she said it was a terrific band. And so she she was very proud of the education. She said that it really encouraged everyone to do their best in everything, and uh, she felt that she had had a good education. She when she joined the Women's Army Corps, she was teased by people that she didn't have a southern accent. And uh she said, Well, I was taught by black white people. This was white nuns from an order in Pennsylvania where that were the instructors in her school. So that gave her a certain amount of confidence, and also she observed from seeing how her father handled difficult situations, he used a firm but a non-confrontational approach in handling the difficulties that there were. For example, he he really needed to do some spare jobs to keep the farm going. He owned a farm which was located on a part of town called Keysville, which was named for his ancestors who had been free blacks before the Civil War and owned the land, this this territory. So, but he he needed to do get you know, have an access to outside jobs to, you know, keep the farm going because farming is a very chancy and depending on the the weather for financial success. So he was not, it was difficult to find the kind of jobs he that could help him earn more money in his local community. And so he wound up um going back to Washington, D.C. to get getting construction jobs, or going to New Jersey to get construction jobs. So she saw that. And also um, she saw how he handled that despite the fact that this was uh the Archdiocese and the Catholic Church was very supportive of this school, Mother Mercy School, there were difficulties there because you know, prejudice was everywhere, despite the well-meaning intentions of these um the sisters from the the order in Pennsylvania. So there was a chapel in the school that anyone, any Catholic, could use. There was no Catholic Church, by the way, in Washington, North Carolina at that time, because it had been destroyed during the Civil War and never replaced. Until Mr. Keyes had helped get this Mother in Mercy school started, either people, Catholics who were living in that town, they would have to go to a nearby town to go to Catholic Church, or sometimes priests from a nearby town would come and do services in a rented room in the town. But once the school was started, it had a chapel, and that chapel allowed any Catholic to come for um for communion, white or black. But she said when white people did come to the chapel for communion, they were served communion first. And she said, you know, that just didn't seem right to her. And she said she and her sisters and brothers would would talk about that as they went home after, you know, church service in the morning at the chapel, that, you know, that in their own church they wouldn't get served first. And also there was uh a couple of incidents here and there. One was on a Christmas Eve, their choir, which was excellent choir, Sarah said, was invited to sing the midnight mass at the white church. A white church was then started in that town two years after the school opened, a whites only church. And so they were invited to sing the Christmas Mass on Christmas Eve. And so they did go there. And their cousin of hers drove Sarah and some of the other choir members to that church. She said, Well, we could have walked, but it was a midnight service, and so her cousin drove them there. And when the leader of the uh noticed that her cousin was sitting in one of the rear pews of the church to wait to drive them back home after the service was over, she raised a fuss about that because black people were not supposed to be sitting in pews in the sanctuary. And so when her father heard about it when they went home, the next day she said their choir did sing Christmas Mass on Christmas Day at their chapel. And uh he then went in to speak to the the head of the school and said he was writing a letter to the archdiocese to tell them that never again would um the choir from that school sing at a church that only allowed white people. So, you know, he he did that in a very firm and orderly manner, but he he did do it and he did stand up for a more equitable way of treating people. So so she she knew about that. And so so when she came back from finally they put her on the bus to let her come back um after she paid her $25 fine, and she told her father what had happened, he encouraged her to do. They said that you could try to come back next week and see if you can get the charges dropped. So he said, let's do that. So they did. They went back, they they found a lawyer who would come and represent them, and um, that didn't work. And so he contacted some of his people he knew from his days of working in Washington, D.C., and they put him in touch with this young black lawyer, Debbie Johnson Roundtree, who had also been in the Women's Army Corps during World War II and had just graduated from Howard University using her GI benefits uh to attend to Howard University Law School. And this was her first big case, and she took it over because she had had a similar experience herself while she was in the Women's Army Corps during World War II, not being allowed to board a bus because she was black, even though she was wearing her women's army corps uniform. And so she she was as determined as Sarah Keys was of seeing that this uh would end. And um you you had said you wanted to know, so how come Sara Keys sat there in that in in the middle of the bus? Well, that was because there was a Supreme Court, one of the many earlier decisions that was also not well enforced was called Morgan versus Virginia. That was in 1946. And uh so uh Sara Keys' father read allowed newspapers, and on the weekends he would share stories uh that were important to her as they would sit on the front porch at their house. And so he told her about this decision, and it was very popular, very well publicized in the black community. This was a decision by the Supreme Court in a case of a woman who was forced to move to the back of a bus on a trip that she was taking from Virginia back to her home in Baltimore. And uh the Supreme Court ruled that an interstate travel, because of a law that had been set up in establishing the Interstate Commerce Commission that said uh there could be no discrimination on um that would cause unjust discrimination against um people in interstate travel, that one state's segregation seating laws could not be used on a bus that went from state to state. So her father had read about this decision and told her about it and said, So when you go and take a bus back and forth from New Jersey to North Carolina. You can sit anywhere on the bus. But he urged her to always get on a bus that wouldn't require changes along the way. Because there was always a danger that a rogue bus driver might cause trouble. And so that is what indeed happened. And that was because there was a loophole in that case that Sarah and her father didn't really understand at that time, which was that the Morgan versus Virginia said no legislation could be used, but it didn't say anything about bus company rules. And so although her decision was obeyed in most parts of the United States, it was not obeyed in many parts of the South because just like what happened what happened with the Sarah Keyes decision, bus companies after Morgan versus Virginia just set up their own segregation seating rules. Now, not all bus drivers obeyed those rules. And in fact, one bus driver on a trip that she was, Sarah took from her hometown to go up to New Jersey. The bus driver, when she got on the bus, said, Oh, honey, you sit right here behind me. So that gave her the idea that, oh, I guess this is, you know, Morgan versus Virginia works, you know. And so on earlier trips it had worked, but on this particular trip it didn't. So that was what was important about the decision that Sarah Keyes earned at the Interstate Commerce Commission. It said that neither legislation nor bus company rules could be used for segregation and interstate seating on interstate transportation.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

You talk about how the decision and the case with the ICC and the outcome was kind of bittersweet. And you've kind of alluded to it in some of your previous answers, but I'd like to give you an opportunity to kind of expand on that. So how why was the decision with the ICC a little bittersweet?

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Well, one, because it wasn't enforced. And two, later, even after it was enforced, um, not that many people remembered it. It was taught in law schools because it was a very important decision. It was an overturning of the idea of separate but equal, which had been established in the 1896 um Supreme Court case, Plessy versus Ferguson. So it was very important from a legal point of view. And so her case was taught in law schools, but it wasn't featured in any of the major books on civil rights history. So that was sort of disappointing. But that situation uh really did get corrected because of this installation of the start of the military women's memorial, which opened in um 1997, because of encouragement from W. Johnson Lountree. Uh, the plaque was installed there that told about their um their victory. And gradually, people like me and others came to learn about this case. And in fact, as a result of our discussions, our conversations, we self-published a little book about her in 2006. And uh we had to self-publish it because we couldn't find a regular publisher. It was a children's book to do the book, because I have subsequently learned, as I've been told by several editors, that um they only do uh books uh well, not only, but mainly do books for children on historical figures if they are household names. And of course, she wasn't a household name. So they do books on Rosa Parks, but not on Sarah Keith. So um, but luckily that book found its way into the hands of black educators in the town where she had been arrested in Roanoke Rapids. They decided they they had grown up, these black educators had grown up in that town and had never heard about her case either. And when they did, they decided they wanted their town, Roanoke Rapids, to um honor for her her courage and to try to make amends for what had happened to her in that town. So initially it was bittersweet, and she did feel in a way sad that um it hadn't been recognized. She wrote a letter to Ebony Magazine uh just before the bicentennial and said to remind them of this case, and they didn't write an article about her. Um, but also she was very reluctant to talk about the case herself, as she said what happened to her on that bus had caught her by surprise. And she thought that she had to do something to try to protect herself. And so she didn't really share the story herself to many people for fear that they might not approve. And she didn't want to get in trouble again. So she taught all told only her two best friends at Women's Army Corps about it. And afterwards, she didn't tell the people in the apartment building where she lived in Brooklyn for nearly for, you know, almost 60 years. And she became a hairdresser, which was something she had been interested in ever since she was a little girl, and she had her own salon in Brooklyn, but she did not talk about case to her her customers because um she knew that some of them were not approving of protests and things like that. And so she just kept it to herself. But when she had an opportunity to talk about it to people who were interested, then she was very eager to talk about it. So uh uh as as a result of what the uh Women's Memorial did in 2006, she um was given an award by the Department of Justice at the Brooklyn office of the U.S. Department of Justice. She was given its Trailblazer Award and she went to that meeting and she talked about what the case had meant to her. And and many years later, one of her relatives who taught at a New Jersey high school invited her to um come and and talk, and and she told the story there. And she also told the story for these um black educators in Roanoke Rapids who entered a contest to win money in order to install a monument about her in Roanoke Rapids. And so she agreed to tell the story of her arrest online, and you can hear excerpts from it on the website of the monument. And there's I give how to reach those excerpts, it's in the bibliography of the book. So you can hear herself tell her story. But if she wasn't confident of who was going to hear it, she was she was cautious. She became cautious. And and one of the educators, Professor Kelly from UNC, had spoken at a program that we did on the Syracuse case for um Carolina K-12. This is a uh educational group in in North Carolina for for teachers. And she said this was a perfect example of black trauma, that the the nonstop um experiences with segregation and discrimination can really wear a person down, and that it was perfectly understandable that she didn't want to get tell the um the story of her arrest and how terrified she was that night when she was in the jail cell, not knowing what might happen to her. She said that every time she told the story, she would feel the terror again. So Professor Kelly said that was very reasonable to think that that would happen. So she was very happy about the monument. So when that happened, we decided we needed to tell the story, the whole story, because they had some white support in Roanoke Rapids, the mayor of that city and two uh surrounding cities supported the installation of the monument. So it did show that maybe change has happened in this country. Well can happen.

SPEAKER_00 30:03

And how does knowing Sarah Keys' story help us better understand the civil rights movement?

SPEAKER_01 30:12

Well, I think how hard it was and how back and forth it was, and how there was this little progress after, well, after Elizabeth Jennings won her case in New York, there was progress in New York, there was progress in Massachusetts, um, but no progress in the South. There was some progress right after the Civil War, and then it all went back again. And uh uh so it it I think it can keep us on the alert now to not have any black back, any backsliding now to victories that we won. Um, and to keep in mind that the attitudes may be changing, but may not have totally changed completely, so that we need to be on guard about that.

unknown 30:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

And what do you hope readers take away from your book? Well, uh that that um that history can be interesting. And that um I tried to tell it in a way that it wasn't like a heavy-handed um um uh uh book and had a lot of personal quotes from her and anecdotes about her, you know, how much she liked watching the the Ed the Beauty Salana's little girl and and um that kind of personal uh aspect of it. And um uh so uh, you know, sometimes history books can be kind of tedious. And so this is a history book that I hope isn't tedious, although I had to be careful not to make it it got rejected from one publisher because they thought I was using too much of a uh the same kind of approach I would have used in writing a book for young people. So I had to sort of toughen up my approach. But so so I hope it can, and it can see that even shy people, quiet, shy person, she was not a civil rights activist. She'd never been to a civil rights protest before she was arrested. She was, she says she did this as a matter of, I have to read you the quote. It's she says, it was a matter of moral principle, she said. Um, I knew I had been unjustly accused of disorderly conduct. I believe in people being treated right and treated fairly no matter what the situation. So she took a stand on this because she was personally offended, and she was also offended that they hadn't shown respect for the United States Army uniform. And so even shy people can step up and have an impact. And that's what something's really interesting about this monument in um Roanoke Rapids. The educators there have started every August giving awards to people who exemplify that same spirit, who are working to try to make things better in their community. So I actually attended one of those ceremonies in 2024, and that year they gave these awards out to people who were making great progress in helping in healthcare field. And every year they give the award out to a different group or different individuals. One year they gave it out to a a teenager who had started a a fund to help um homeless children in their town. So try so um so I hope that maybe that in the book can make people say, well, there's some maybe there's something that we can do in our uh in our lovely.

SPEAKER_00 33:31

And where should people go when they've finished the book and they want to learn more about you and the work that you do?

SPEAKER_01 33:37

Well, my my website, www.amieneathmanbooks.com. Yes, and I have written a couple of other books on civil rights history, one on the two families were um whose ancestors were part of the Plessy versus Ferguson found case at the Supreme Court in 1896. Uh, two descendants of the two principals in that case met. Um, they uh decided to form the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation to try to bring people together rather than have them separate and separate but equal. Also, I wrote a book about my hometown of Baltimore, about the desegregation and amusement park there where the park desegregated on the same day as the March in Washington in 1963, where Dr. King gave his I Have a Dream speech. So that's the theme of both of these books, that a little girl named Sharon Langley, who was 11 months old, was the first black child to go on a ride at the Baltimore Amusement Park on its first day without segregation in 1963, taking a ride on the carousel. So when the carousel, when the park closed several years later because of a bad hurricane, that carousel was bought by the concessionaires at the Smithsonian and has been on the National Mall from the mid-1980s onward and was just taken off for two years to be repaired. But it's back on the National Mall now, was installed in a big ceremony on April 23rd. I was there, and we also wrote a uh historical marker for the carousel, which tells about its role in civil rights history, and that was reinstalled too. Sharon Langley, who was the co-author with me of a children's book about this story. We were both there on the 23rd, and it was just really wonderful for it to be reinstalled again. So that's a very, a very positive, heartwarming civil rights story also. But I also wrote before that children's book came out, I wrote a book for adults and teens on the story too. So there's both versions of it.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

Definitely. And uh I'll include the link to your website in the show notes for the episode. So before I let you go, is there anything that we haven't covered that you want to make sure future readers know? Well, there's also a children's book for this, for this.

SPEAKER_01 36:04

Um it's called um Sara Keys Evans: The Power of Quiet Courage. And I tried over and over again this time also to get a regular publisher to do that book, and I just couldn't find anyone. She was still not regarded as a household name. So um, luckily, the North Carolina Office of Archives and History had decided uh uh just a few years ago to do a series of books for young readers on North Carolina North Carolina heroes who were not well known. And so um I had sent a proposal for a book for children about Sarah Keys to them uh, you know, a couple of years before, and a new head took over uh two years ago who said, Oh, we have got to do this. And so she she did that. And a North Carolina artist who did the illustrations are just beautiful. And so there is now a book for a young people about Sarah Keys, as well as the uh Duke University press books, too.

SPEAKER_00 37:08

Lovely. All right. Well, for the listeners out there, if you are looking to broaden your knowledge of civil rights history, consider grabbing a copy of Writing Into History and learning more about Sarah Keys Evans. Thank you again, Amy. Oh well, thank you for having me. My thanks again to Amy for spending her time with me. If you want to learn more about the incredible story of Sarah Keys Evans, be sure to pick up a copy of Writing Into History. Thanks, peeps. I'll see you next time. Thanks for sitting down with me as I explore this chapter of American history. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together.