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RIDING INTO HISTORY
The Surprising Story of Sarah Kevs Evans and the Fight to Desegregate Bus Travel
By Amy Nathan, with Sarah Keys Evans   /  A book for a general audience from Duke University Press, March 24, 2026

Sarah Keys Evans's landmark 1955 Civil Rights victory, "Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company" not only desegregated interstate bus travel, it also provided the legal precedent needed during the 1961 Freedom Rides to pressure the Interstate Commerce Commission to properly enforce its Sarah Keys ruling. Often overlooked in many accounts of the Civil Rights era, her arrest and victory are crucial milestones in the fight against segregation. RIDING INTO HISTORY draws on years of personal conversations with Sarah Keys Evans as well as extensive research to present a biography of this hero and her role in the struggle for civil rights alongside the long history of many other Black Americans, especially women, who protested racial segregation in interstate travel.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/riding-into-history

 

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The Turned the Page Review on substack

 Riding into History

How Sarah Keys Evans Desegregated Interstate Bus Travel

Eleanor J. Bader / Jan 16, 2026

 

When 23-year-old Women's Army Corp. soldier Sarah Keys (later Sarah Keys Evans) boarded a bus from Fort Dix, New Jersey, she was excited about visiting her family in Washington, North Carolina, and expected to enjoy a brief break from military service. But when the bus stopped in Roanoke Rapids, a small city less than 100 miles from her hometown, a replacement bus driver ordered her to move to the back of the bus. When she refused, she was arrested and jailed. It was 1952. Both the arrest and incarceration were illegal, and Keys knew it. As a Black woman raised in a justice-minded household, she'd learned that six years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled (Morgan v. Virginia) that state segregation laws did not apply to interstate bus travel, and that on buses moving between states, Black passengers were free to sit wherever they pleased.

 

This, however, was the policy on paper, and Keys quickly discovered that the decision was frequently flouted due to a loophole that allowed Southern bus companies to enforce segregation. The loophole, Nathan explains, was language-based: "The Morgan decision said that Virginia's segregation legislation couldn't be imposed on riders heading to or arriving from other states," but it did not explicitly make a company's segregation rules illegal.

 

Keys sued to end this discrepancy and protest the violation she'd experienced. A media campaign supplemented litigation, with attorney Dovey Johnson Roundtree filing a raft of eventually-successful complaints. According to Nathan, on September 22, 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission "ordered interstate bus companies to end segregation on all bus trips, even ones that didn't cross into another states." The ICC further outlawed segregation in bus and train stations as well as in their restaurants, waiting areas, restrooms, and water fountains.

 

Post decision, Sarah Keys Evans opted for anonymity, rarely discussing her role in the historic case. Riding Into History, Nathan's third book about Evans (it follows two children's books) aims to change this. But the book also does more than this. In addition to showcasing Evans, the book casts a spotlight on sexism: "Evans' ICC victory was mainly the result of two women working together," Nathan writes, "without supervision or collaboration with a famous male lawyer." Perhaps this explains why Rosa Parks was heralded, while Sarah Keys Evans was not.