A campus exhibit intended to prevent students from forgetting a piece of history might be forgotten itself.
The 50th anniversary of a historic bus boycott is being commemorated in Hill Memorial Library, but it seems few students know about it.
A computer and audio exhibit featuring newspaper clippings and interviews from participants in the boycott pays tribute to the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott. It currently is open to the University community and general public until Aug. 30.
The exhibit is sponsored by the University T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History and the Department of Women and Gender Studies.
Mary Price, director of the Center for Oral History, encouraged students to go see the exhibit.
“It takes about 30 minutes for the enitre exhibit, but you don’t have to do all of it at once,” she said. “It uses actual voices of people who lived during segregation and the boycott and tells the story in their own words.”
Hill Memorial does not have a system for keeping tack of the number of visitors who enter the library to view the boycott exhibit, but employees said there had not been an influx of visitors since the exhibit opened.
Denise Parker, a plant and soil science junior, knew there had been a bus boycott in Baton Rouge, but she did not know the University had an exhibit.
“It is put on file as being the first boycott in history,” Parker said. “I’d like to go see it [the exhibit].”
Other students, however, were not only unfamiliar with the exhibit but the boycott itself. Lance Fogleman, a biochemistry freshman, said he had never heard of it and did not intend to go see the exhibit.
“Maybe if it were more known,” Fogleman said.
Fogleman said he would go see the exhibit if he had heard about the boycott before and if its location were more convenient for him to get to.
The Baton Rouge Bus Boycott, which took place form June 19 to June 23,1953, is not as well known as the Montgomery, Ala., boycott that took place two years later and was headed by Martin Luther King, Jr.
The exhibit traced the boycott’s beginnings to January 1953, when fares for Baton Rouge buses were raised from 10 to 15 cents. Black leaders complained to the city-parish government about the rise in costs because, according to the exhibit, 80 percent of bus riders were black.
The city-parish council responded by passing Ordinance 222, which required buses to be filled from back to front by blacks and front to back by whites.
Ordinance 222 did not satisfy many members of the blackcommunity, and they commenced with the bus boycott.
The boycott came to an end after four days, when , according to the exhibit, T.J. Jemison and other black leaders negotiated with the city-parish council to pass Ordinance 251.
This ordinance reserved the first two seats on buses for white people and the last two seats for black people. The ordinance then called for the remaining seats to be filled from front to back by whites and back to front by blacks, like Ordinance 222.
Willis Reed, a Baton Rouge resident and participant in the boycott who is featured in the exhibit’s audio interviews, said the Baton Rouge boycott helped jump-start the civil rights movement in Baton Rouge and served as an example for other cities.
“Martin Luther King came down here to find out how it was planned,” Reed said.
When asked what he would say to University students who had never heard about the boycott, Reed said he thought students would find the story interesting.
“There was a boycott in Baton Rouge,” he said. “It started breaking down segregation in the South.”
Admittance to the exhibit is free. Hill Memorial Library operating hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday.