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- Description is exactly "A series of articles from May and November of 1956 reporting on the May 1, 1956 integration of its buses by Shoals Transit in response to the recent US Supreme Court ruling outlawing the segregation of buses.
Shoals Transit, headquartered in Sheffield, in Colbert County, which was owned by American Transit Lines, Inc. of St. Louis, MO, announced that it would no longer enforce segregation rules on its buses, defending the action as the only one it could take as long as federal law outlawed segregation while AL state law continued to allow it.
With an estimated 55,000 residents in the Shoals, one-fifth of those residents were African-American and according to company official Tom Bolen, of Shoals Transit Lines' 60,000 passengers, one-third were African-American. According to Bolen there had been no problems connected with the company's decision to integrate, and none were expected, "unless it is fomented from the outside."
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