Driver made Black passengers sit in back of Jefferson Lines bus, state investigation finds

Two years ago, Xavier Davis was boarding a Jefferson Lines bus to ride home from North Dakota to Minnesota when the driver told Davis and another passenger they needed to ride in the back of the bus.

Both passengers were Black men.

An argument ensued and the driver threatened to call the police if the two men didn’t move to the back and sit down. The men, who did not know each other, did so.

Four months later, Davis initiated a Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation. A memorandum filed earlier this year by Commissioner Rebecca Lucero found probable cause the driver discriminated against the passengers because of their race.

This week, Davis filed a lawsuit against Jefferson Lines and the driver in Hennepin County District Court.

Lucero wrote in her memo that Jefferson Lines and the driver failed to give any reason that wasn’t racially discriminatory for forcing Davis and the other passenger to ride in the back of the bus.

She said the investigation showed that the driver let white passengers sit where they wanted, and that making the two Black passengers sit in the back of the bus was driven by “racially discriminatory stereotypes underlying the interaction.”

The driver, identified only as “John Doe” in the lawsuit, gave several arguments for why the two passengers needed to sit in the back of the bus.

Jefferson Lines policy is to board the bus on a first come, first served basis, but the driver told the Black passengers that company policy was to board from the back of the bus to the front.

The driver also thought the two passengers were travelling together, even though their tickets were for different destinations, and he later maintained that the passengers smelled like marijuana. After the situation became argumentative, the driver threatened to involve law enforcement.

In her memo, Lucero wrote that all of these actions by the bus driver were “rooted in discriminatory and stereotypical expectations,” including that two Black people must be travelling together and that, “Black men are more likely to smoke cannabis or engage in illegal behavior.”

“Driver’s implication that he might need to involve the police was rooted in the trope that a Black man questioning Driver’s decision was somehow threatening or disruptive,” Lucero wrote. “There was no evidence that [Davis] engaged in any activity that would warrant police intervention.”

During the course of the investigation, Jefferson Lines asked the driver to complete an incident report. The driver defended his reasons for asking the Black passengers to sit at the back of the bus. He pointed to the smell of marijuana and that he preferred passengers to board from the back because he has noticed that passengers don’t like getting bumped with luggage by other passengers walking down the aisle.

One month after the incident, Jefferson Lines issued the driver a verbal warning for deviating from the company’s seating policy.

Davis is seeking damages based on being denied full and equal enjoyment of public accommodations. The lawsuit argues the discrimination is especially abhorrent because of the well-known civil disobedience of Rosa Parks, whose protest and subsequent arrest for not sitting in the back of a National City Lines bus in Montgomery, Ala., helped spark the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s.

Sam Savage, the attorney representing Davis, said that since the human rights investigation was completed, Davis and Jefferson Lines have been in mediation to try to settle their dispute.

“They just are unwilling to do the right thing,” Savage said.

One of the largest bus companies in the United States, Jefferson Lines is based in Minneapolis and operates in 14 states. Its chair, Charlie Zelle, is also chair of the Metropolitan Council, although he told the Star Tribune Thursday that he is no longer involved in operations management.

A spokesperson for the company said that due to pending litigation, it could not comment on the lawsuit.

In 2009, the Star Tribune reported allegations from Michelle Jordan that she and her 3-year-old daughter were told they had to sit in the back of the bus by a Jefferson Lines driver after boarding in Minneapolis for a trip to Milwaukee.

Jordan refused; she was the only Black person on the bus.

They were later kicked off the bus in Abbotsford, Wis., and left stranded outside a convenience store. The driver called police and said they were distracting him.

Jordan said her daughter was playing with a doll that sang “I’m a Little Teacup” on repeat. Two passengers on the bus gave conflicting accounts of what happened: one who said the distraction was minor and another who said the daughter was running in the aisles while Jordan was on her cellphone.

The company did an internal review of the complaint of racial bias.

Susan Du of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.