06/04/2026
A bus driver in Tallahassee refused to give a Black college student her dime back, and it cost the city its entire transit system. Wilhelmina Jakes offered to get off the bus if driver Max Coggins returned her ten-cent fare.
He called the police instead, and within forty-eight hours, 2,300 FAMU students voted to shut the buses down.
Ten cents, that was the whole argument.
That was what a bus ride cost in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1956. And that was, as things turned out, the price the whole city paid for what it had been doing to Black people on public transit for decades.
On a Saturday afternoon, May 26 of that year, three Florida A&M University students boarded a crowded city bus at the stop on South Adams and Canal streets. They had been shopping downtown, nothing unusual, and each dropped a dime into the fare box the way every rider did.
One of the three walked to the back of the bus, where Black passengers in Tallahassee were expected to sit. Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson did not.
The only two open seats on the entire bus sat on a three-person bench directly behind the driver, beside a white woman. Jakes and Patterson sat down, because there was nowhere else to sit.
The white woman said nothing.
Driver Max Coggins did. He turned around and ordered both women to the back of the bus, where every seat was already taken, and told them to stand.
Jakes told him she would leave the bus if he returned her dime. Coggins refused.
He did not drive the route.
He pulled into a nearby service station, cut the engine, and called the Tallahassee police.
Three squad cars arrived for two college students sitting in the only available seats on a city bus. Officers arrested Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson that afternoon and charged them with "placing themselves in a position to incite a riot."
No riot had occurred. No voices had been raised.
The white woman beside them had never complained. Two young women had sat in the only empty seats on a public bus, and the State of Florida treated it like a crime.
They were released on bond later that day and taken back to their off-campus rooming house at 123 West Jennings Street. The next evening, the answer came from the Ku Klux Klan.
A cross was set ablaze in their front yard.
Jakes and Patterson fled to the FAMU campus that night and took shelter in a dormitory. The news of what had happened to them, the arrest on Saturday and then the burning cross on Sunday, spread through the student body faster than the administration could contain.
By Monday morning, the campus was ready.
Student Government Association president Broades Hartley called a meeting of the full student body. Twenty-three hundred students gathered, and the vote was not close.
They would boycott the city buses for the rest of the semester.
Students poured into the street outside Lee Hall, stopped the first city bus that passed through campus, and called on every Black passenger aboard to step off and join them. Within hours, word had spread through every Black neighborhood in Tallahassee.
In 1956, Tallahassee was a city of roughly 38,000 people, more than a third of them Black. Most of those Black residents worked the lowest-paying jobs available, domestic work, construction, service labor, and most did not own a car.
They rode the bus because there was no other way to get to work. Eighty percent of the city's bus passengers were Black.
The next night, May 29, Reverend C.K. Steele called a meeting at Bethel Missionary Baptist Church on the south side of town. Steele had arrived in Tallahassee only four years earlier, a coal miner's son from Gary, West Virginia, who had studied at Morehouse College in Atlanta and served congregations in Montgomery and Augusta before settling at Bethel in 1952.
He was forty-two years old, and he was not a man given to theatrics.
Roughly five hundred Black residents filled the pews at Bethel that evening. The question on the table was simple, whether the whole community would stand behind the students.
The vote was unanimous.
That night, the Inter-Civic Council was born. Steele was elected president.
The ICC drafted three demands for the city. Bus seating would be first-come, first-served, all passengers would be treated with courtesy, and Black drivers would be hired.
Until those demands were met, not a single Black resident of Tallahassee would ride a city bus.
Steele understood something the city had not yet figured out. The bus company's revenue ran through the back of the bus, and the people who rode the most and paid the most were the same people being told to stand.
The boycott held.
Within two weeks, the bus company was losing money it could not replace. Ridership collapsed by sixty percent.
The city raised fares by a nickel, hoping to offset the loss, and it did not matter. On July 1, 1956, the bus system shut down entirely for the first time in seventeen years.
The ICC organized a carpool system to keep the community moving. Sixty-five volunteer drivers ran routes that mirrored the bus lines, ferrying Black workers to and from their jobs every morning and every evening.
The city called the carpools illegal.
Officials sent a committee to meet with City Manager Arvah Hopkins and bus company manager Charles Carter, and both men dismissed the ICC's demands. The editor of the Tallahassee Democrat tried to broker peace through a biracial council, but it fell apart after one meeting.
The City Commission brought in fifteen Black leaders it considered sympathetic, including legendary FAMU football coach Jake Gaither, hoping they would convince the community to end the boycott. None of it worked.
The people kept walking.
In October 1956, twenty-two carpool drivers, Steele among them, were arrested and charged with operating a transportation system without a franchise. A judge found every one of them guilty and levied a total of $11,000 in fines.
Steele paid it all.
He spent the next five years traveling to Black churches across the country, preaching from one pulpit after another, to earn back what the court had taken from him. The boycott did not break.
Steele had said it plainly at a mass meeting, standing behind the same pulpit at Bethel where the boycott had been voted into existence. "I would rather walk in dignity than ride in humiliation."
He meant it.
And so did the people who kept walking.
The Klan kept coming. Rocks were thrown through the windows of Steele's home, which sat right next door to the church.
Bottles shattered against the walls at night. A cross was burned on the lawn of Bethel Baptist itself.
Steele addressed it at a meeting, and he did not hedge.
"They have thrown rocks, they have smashed car windows, and they have burned crosses," he told the congregation. "Well, I am happy to state here tonight that I have no fear of them and, praise God, I have no hate for them."
The room held that sentence the way a church holds a hymn.
Nobody left.
Meanwhile, something else was happening in Tallahassee that the boycott had set in motion. Reverend K.S. Dupont, the ICC's vice president, announced he would run for City Commission in February 1957, the first Black person to seek elected office in the city since Reconstruction.
In November 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that segregated seating on public buses was unconstitutional. The ruling had come from Montgomery, where Martin Luther King Jr. had been leading his own boycott for more than a year.
Steele and King were already close, two Morehouse men who had been building the same thing in different states. The ruling should have settled the matter in Tallahassee.
It did not.
The City Commission refused to repeal its own segregation ordinance. So on Christmas Eve, 1956, Steele decided to answer them with something words could not do.
He boarded a Tallahassee city bus, walked past the driver, and sat down at the front.
Reverend H. McNeal Harris sat beside him. A photographer from Life magazine captured the frame, two Black ministers seated calmly at the front of a Southern city bus, the city's defiance still hanging in the air around them.
That photograph went across the country.
The city suspended the bus company's franchise. Bus manager Charles Carter and nine of his drivers were arrested for allowing the integrated rides.
On New Year's Eve, Steele's home was hit again with rocks, and another cross was burned on Bethel Baptist's lawn. Governor LeRoy Collins, a Tallahassee native, stepped in on January 1, 1957, and suspended bus service entirely.
Six days later, the City Commission repealed the segregation ordinance and replaced it with an "assigned seating" plan based on "weight distribution" and "peace, tranquility, and good order." Everyone in Tallahassee understood exactly what that meant.
But the cracks were showing, and they ran deep. On January 19, three Black FAMU students and three white Florida State University students boarded a bus together and deliberately sat as in*******al pairs, testing the new law.
The three who switched seats were arrested. The fight was not over that week.
It took months more, a slow process of Black riders sitting where they chose and city officials gradually deciding they could not hold the line. Collins admitted later what the boycott had cost.
"The boycott hurt Black people more than it did white people, in the sense that they needed that service more than white people did," the governor said. "But it showed the people of this community that they were very determined to right this wrong."
Steele never stopped.
In early 1957, Bayard Rustin called him about forming a conference of Southern civil rights leaders. That call became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, co-founded by Steele and King, and Steele was elected its first vice president.
He went on to file the lead lawsuit desegregating Leon County schools. He challenged discriminatory business practices across the city.
He marched with King at Selma.
He described the whole of it, everything the movement had taken and everything it had given, as "the pain and the promise."
He died in 1980, at sixty-six, still pastoring Bethel Baptist. That was the same church where five hundred people had voted to stop riding the buses twenty-four years before.
Today, a statue of C.K. Steele stands at the downtown bus terminal that carries his name, the C.K. Steele Bus Plaza, at Tennessee Street and Adams. Riders board there every morning and sit wherever they choose.
On the FAMU campus, a Florida Heritage marker tells the story of Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, two students who sat in the only open seats on a Saturday afternoon and changed a city. The marker does not mention Max Coggins.
It does not mention the dime he would not give back.
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