(My Response)

A Technological  Context for the Boycott

I think you  might want to put the jitneys into a broader context of transportation policy. One could probably make a case for local governments functioning  as Luddites during the Civil Rights movement, that is, trying to repress the implications of the automobile.

According to  Harvard Sitkoff, (_The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1980_, 1981), when the bus strike began, the Montgomery Improvement Association leadership immediately  got the black taxicab companies to turn their taxicabs into ad-hoc jitneys, waiving the  city-mandated minimum fare. The mayor responded by threatening sanctions for breaking the minimum fare, and the MIA  leadership responded by organizing a car pool with about 150 automobiles and about 100 stations. I haven't tracked down a more detailed source, but the organization seems to look a lot like the later "dial-a-ride" schemes, centrally organized  jitneys run by transit authorities. The mayor responded by legally harassing the drivers.  This is where your applicants for a jitney license  come in. There was a whole legal construct designed to create two discrete categories, viz. private automobiles and cabs for the classes, and buses for the  masses, excluding  jitneys in the middle.

When the dust had ultimately settled, fifty years later, the Montgomery bus  system was in an extremely marginal condition, used on a daily basis by about one percent of the population, at  effective speeds slower than a bicycle. Mass transit only really works well when you have skyscrapers, or perhaps in a college town. In a large city, transit tends to  be naturally segregated in the sense that there are two or three tiers of transit, with different trade-offs of speed and local stops. A more or less similar argument could probably be made for the  Greyhound stations and the  rise of the Interstate Highway system. The whole "back of the bus" mentality may have  reflected the fact that there increasingly wasn't a front of the bus anymore. 

There is considerable evidence that buses are not able to compete  with jitneys as a general  thing, at least in low-density areas, meaning practically anywhere in the South. However, jitneys seem to have been a kind  of  "moving window" in the sense that they were rapidly succeeded by private automobile ownership. The first burst of "jitneyism" in the North and West, circa 1915, coincided with the peak boom year of the automobile industry. Jitneyism was promptly repressed by a mass of local ordinances sponsored  by street car companies.  After the automobile  industry's 1921  overproduction downturn, the used automobile market took off. Six years of technological progress represented the difference between a machine which was economic if used communally and a machine which  was economic if used individually.  Something roughly similar seems to have happened in the post office, circa 1915-16, involving disputes between the Wilson Administration's Texan Postmaster-General,  Albert  Burleson, and rural postal carriers who wanted to use motorcycles to deliver the mail. The carriers wanted rural mail-delivery to be a part-time occupation of mature men with other resources, eg.  farmers, but Burleson wanted carriers to be poorly  paid young full-timers. The vehicle of Ludditism was paradoxically technological, to demand an impractical standard of mechanical perfection in motorized transport,  forcing the vast majority of carriers to use horses. By 1925 or so, the well-equipped rural carrier was driving a bargain-basement Model T Ford, furnished with a caterpillar-tread conversion kit (like a snowmobile, on a larger scale), capable of going more or less anywhere the later four-wheel-drive vehicles would be able to go. 

In the 1950's, the South was catching up with the North in terms of mechanization. The advent of the cotton harvester is a fairly good benchmark. It was the sort of machine which could have happened forty years earlier, except for  the South's general lack of  mechanical competence. One would have  to track down statistics on automobile ownership in  Alabama and Mississippi,  but one suspects that on the eve of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the  Deep South had reached approximately the  point of departure which the  rest of the country had reached in 1915. Of course there  is a whole mass of factual information which needs to be collected: who rode Montgomery city buses and why, who rode Greyhound buses and why, who ate in Greyhound station restaurants, and were they the  same people who rode the bus? 

A city bus can be viewed as a similar exercise in paradoxical Ludditism. It is not terribly practical, save on the  highest-density routes. However, given its long wheelbase, the bus tends to require special skills to drive, similar to a semi-trailer. That is, it tends  to make driving into a "mystery," available only to a special elite (I used to live in Cincinnati, the City of the Seven Hills. To watch a Cincinnati bus driver taking a bus down a hill of three hundred vertical feet, with hairpin turns and a grade of ten percent, is to witness artistry of the highest order). A jitney driver, driving a much smaller vehicle, would not have to exhibit that order of skill.  Driving a bus was a kind of public performance of technological priesthood.

If you look at government white papers on transportation from the last traffic-energy-environment crisis, back in the 1960's and 1970's, you find that the more enlightened transportation planners were somewhat interested in jitneys.  However, they tended to "assimilate" the jitney, by insisting that it be plugged  into a centralized radio-controlled dispatching system with a computer-- and this at a time when computers were still big expensive machines. In effect, the transport planner looked at the toys the Air Force had, and said that he wanted  those, too.  However, the main thread of the planners' desire was towards an automatic, driverless vehicle running on an automatic road, automatically switched and routed. Since using this system would not be dependent on the ability to drive, nor would it have the high direct labor costs of taxicabs,  the whole notion of public transportation would be effectively  abolished, in approximately the same sense that the  party-line telephone  and the manual switchboard were being abolished. 

The foregoing is a very brief and conjectural sketch.  Now,  one can detect similar or analogous responses to other technologies, for example, the response of authoritarian governments to internet cafes. It is hard to say how far one can expand the analogy.

http://urbanhabitat.org/highwayrobbery

http://www.montgomerytransit.com/

http://www.firsttransit.com/FirsttransitView.php?id=115

Editorial, Change transportation mindset, Montgomery Advertiser, circa June 22, 2007
http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070622/OPINION01/706210349/1006/rss06

James  H. Bruns, Motorized Mail, 1997 (Krause Publications, Iola, WI)

Tomorrow's  Transportation: New Systems for the Urban Future,  U. S.  Department  of  Housing  and  Urban  Development,  Office  of Metropolitan  Development, Urban  Transportation  Administration, Washington  D.C.,  1968 (Library of Congress catalog  number  68-61300)

Metrotran-2000:  A  Study  of  Future  Concepts  in  Metropolitan  Transportation   for   the  Year   2000,   Cornell  Aeronautical Laboratories,  Inc., by: Robert A. Wolf, Transportation  Research Department, CAL No. 150, October 1967

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(My Response:)

(06/02/2010 02:36 PM)

Economic Contexts for  Public Accommodation.

A generic problem of the Civil Rights "narrative" is that it does not have a very good economic and technological context. I have commented about this in respect of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

[Above]

but this also applies to the Sit-Ins, and by extension, to the Civil Rights law as it applies to public accommodations.

The Sit-Ins did not typically involve small businesses. They tended to involve branches of national chains. The defining  first sit-in in Greensboro was in a Woolworth's, a chain dime store. Perhaps  Ralph Luker could comment  on this point in somewhat  more detail, but the intent of the  students involved in sit-ins was in some considerable part to force large Northern corporations to cease treating accommodation with  "Jim Crow" as a mere local difference. That  was of course what happened, fairly quickly. The main office in  Chicago or New York decreed integration, and  that was the  end of the matter. If the local  manager didn't  like it, he  was welcome to find another job, and  the same applied with even more force to the people  behind  the  soda counter.  The  local manager  was not  master in his own house, or anything like that. He was a bureaucrat under orders.  Over the last fifty years,  grocery stores, of course, went from being small businesses on the street corner to  being giant  store chains, and merged into other  kinds of  stores, to the point that it is increasingly difficult to tell a  grocery store from a discount/department  store.

For what it is worth, the chains seem to have been disproportionately Northern. The  North produced  men like Ray  Kroc of McDonald's (a Chicagoan of Bohemian descent), who could apply logistics and industrial engineering methods to run small stores with  such efficiency that they  could support a national command structure, and absentee stockholders, and still compete with  independent stores.What makes McDonald's work is the  fact of standardization, meaning that you can go into a McDonald's  in a place  you have never been, and get  the kind of food you expect to get, not as good as it might be, to be sure, but not  as bad as it might be, either.  Now, I grant you that Sam Walton of Wal-Mart was a southerner,  but he only arrived very  late in the game, after about a hundred years of experimentation.One characteristic of men like Kroc and Walton was that they tended to filter  out  social interactions, and concentrate on the  business at  hand, to construct it in such a way as not to contain social interactions. That is, they would ask whether it was possible to sell X via vending machines, or  something in that direction, at a much lower price. Quite often it was. The further trend was to the internet. The gloriously unsuccessful WebVan internet grocer was run by Louis Borders, who  had  started out running a college bookstore  in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

I am tolerably sure that Woolworth's and its rival chains would have run their soda fountains as "loss-leaders," with  a view to attracting more expensive purchases. There  is a genre of "starving graduate student"  stories-- for example, the actor William Shatner (Captain Kirk of  Star Trek) is said to have lived largely on Kresge's fruit salad when he was doing  "repertory theater" as a young man in the 1950's. (Stephen  Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, _The Making of Star Trek_,  1968, p. 219). Woolworth's was able to function as a whole because it had a more efficient purchasing organization in Brooklyn, that great district of small factories,  than an independent  store somewhere in  the South could possibly have. For practical purposes,  prior to desegregation, Woolworth's had two price schedules-- one for Whites and one for  Blacks. Obviously, that  did rise to the level of blatant economic discrimination.

Running a bar inherently involves dealing with patrons who have had too  much. Bars  get sued when someone exits, reeling drunk, and then causes an automobile accident. This is, I think, where  [Lawrence] Brooks Hughes' "tough guy" approach is relevant. The corporatist approach to selling alcohol, as represented by, say, Seven-Eleven, is that they sell beer by the six-pack (or nowadays by the  "suitcase-pack"), but  that they don't pretend  to provide a place to drink it, or to supervise the drinking.  Their customers are supposed to drink at  home, and if they become drunk in a public place instead, say the local  park, that becomes a nuisance for the police to deal with.  The corporation doesn't try to run a workingman's bar, in short.

Barbershops are also different from stores, of course. I am reminded of Robert Morley's  line, as Louis XI,  in the  film _Quentin Durward_ (1955): [going by  memory] "If there is  one  man a  king  must  trust,  it  is  his  barber-- who  daily holds a  knife at  his throat!" More mundanely, a good barbershop is a kind of clubhouse. Any hundred or so men, under the standards of trim prevailing  in 1960, could have clubbed together and supported a barbershop in their own neighborhood. I recall  sitting in a  barbershop in a Philadelphia neighborhood, circa 1990, waiting the better part of an hour for  my haircut, and in the meantime scratching the ears of a large and shaggy mutt  named  Lana (at a guess, a German Shepherd-Birddog-cross), keeping her amused  while her person, a local editor, was reading through my tearsheet file (*). The Italian  barber  had made the  introduction, in  his capacity as compere.  The same kind of thing applies  for a bar.

Here is a blog thread about a  case  involving what one  might call the  boundaries of  public accommodation.  It involves  an apartment-sharing bureau (Roommates) and a classified-advertisements-listing  service (Craigslist), which had posted apartment-sharing ads. The law  in question is not the Civil Rights Act per se, but the closely related Fair Housing  Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968).

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080403/151351742.shtml

and see my analysis:

http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20080403/151351742#c579
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HUD site:  Fair Housing Laws and Presidential Executive Orders

http://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/FHLaws/index.cfm
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Quentin Durward (1955):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0048528/
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(*) Tearsheet file-- a custom prevailing among print journalists, a set of copies of published work, eg. things in  newspapers and magazines. In recent  years, that  meant photocopies,  but the  name survives from a time when the cheapest  way to assemble a  file was to purchase extra copies and tear  out the  pages one wanted. Hence tearsheet. The functional equivalent of a C.V.
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My comments in a comment  thread, relating to:


                                                          formerly: http://hnn.us/articles/7919.html



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In response to a suggestion by Chamberlain (10/22/2004 8:56 PM) that slavery could have been extended to western mining, because slavery had been used in ancient mines, I responded (10/23/2004 8:28 AM):

Yes and no. The ancient tradition preceded  explosives and stopeing.(*)  Dynamite produces a kind of  miner who is also a grenadier when the situation calls for it. An example would be the Bolivian miners in the revolution of 1952. The point about tobacco and cotton was that, for a time, they resisted simply having energy thrown at them. Mines yielded to dynamite. Grain yielded to the McCormick reaper.  In England, they were doing steam plowing by 1870 or so, using a stationary steam engine with a cable winch to pull equipment across fields, and of course steam power was mandatory for "tiling," ie. installing drains under fields to control waterlogging.

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Re the Bolivian miners:

June C. Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0231080514/002-5869904-9054436?v=glance

Amazon comment pages about books are  notoriously unreliable, but this one seems to be substantially accurate, as near as I can remember from having read the boo twenty years ago.
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(*) the verb "stope" (not to be confused with stop) has a special meaning in mining technology. It means to pull down or blow down the roof. In metal mines, the veins, being volcanic magma channels, are predominantly vertical. So the idea is to cut in underneath, and let gravity  help in removing the ore. Stopeing can be done with a  pick, but it is best done with explosives, starting with gunpowder  and progressing to dynamite.

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http://www.durham-miner.org.uk/miner/projects.nsf/0/acd11c7fa817916b80256e82004a471a?OpenDocument

[link broken and irretrievable, even with the wayback machine]
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A  USGS Textbook on mining

ANATOMY OF A MINE FROM PROSPECT TO PRODUCTION, United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service Intermountain Research Station, General Technical Report INT-GTR-35, Revised February 1995

https://www.fs.usda.gov/geology/includes/minerals/anatomy_mine.pdf


I once read in an Australian mining engineering textbook a description of something called "automatic stopeing,"  which the above textbook apparently does not cover. This involves digging out  multiple underground rooms, one above the other, and placing explosives from them,  in such a way as  to  blow down the entirety of a vein in one  blast.
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An old novel,  contains a reference (at the start of ch. 16) to what may  be pre-explosive stopeing.

R.M. Ballantyne, "Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines," 1868

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/21726/pg21726-images.html