Originally written by Wade Rawlins and published in the Chattanooga Times Free Press on March 17, 1988.
City’s first black bus driver recalls gunshots, slurs of early years
Paul Gholston took the wheel as Chattanooga’s first black bus driver when blacks were still fighting to move to the front of the bus.
Gholston, a former janitor and foundry worker, began driving in 1963 as the South embarked on its long, unfinished journey toward desegregation and racial equity.
Now the 62-year-old driver—who endured threats, was spit at and even had his bus shot with bullets—has reached the end of his career—a rocky ride mapped by faith and conviction.
“It was pretty tough,” Gholston, a soft-spoken man with white hair, recalled this week. “They threatened me in different ways. For some reason or another, I wasn’t afraid. I just had in my mind I was going to drive.”
His friends and co-workers describe Gholston as a quiet man who avoided controversy. A dependable worker, Gholston performed his job with care and without complaint. He won awards for 21 years of perfect attendance and safe driving, and he earned his co-workers’ respect.
Apparently, it was Gholston’s calm disposition and neat appearance that persuaded the managers of Southern Coach Lines, the forerunner of CARTA, to choose him as the company’s first black driver.
In the early 1960s, blacks were pressing for their civil rights, and transit companies, like other business, were under pressure to integrate their workforces. Signs banishing blacks to the backs of buses and to separate water foundations had recently come down.
Gholston, who grew up on a farm in La Grange, Ga., had worked as a janitor for Southern Coach four years when two bus company supervisors asked him to set aside his broom.
“I think it was a sign of the times,” said Dyer Butterfield Jr., who was then president of Southern Coach Lines. “He was personable, efficient and interested in his work. We felt that he had the capabilities to progress, handle a bus and handle the public in a courteous manner.”
Gholston recalled, “Mr. Butterfield told me, “Don’t refuse it, That’s the problem now, that you people don’t stick together. You should go out and drive. Jackie Robinson made history by going on.”
The supervisors told him bus driving was cleaner, paid more than $35 a week he received as janitor and was a good opportunity for someone who had completed only the sixth grade.
“My cousins said they wouldn’t do it,” Gholston said. “They said it wasn’t worth it. I said I had made up my mind. I didn’t like being in marches and going on, but I did want to participate in a way that I would help out.”
The managers asked Gholston to select a black co-worker to train as a driver with him. He did, but the man withdrew before the training began.
Gholston said he prepared himself for what lay ahead.
During the early years, Gholston encountered a mixture of support and resistance, but most indifference from fellow drivers, he said. For three months after he began driving, he kept his janitor’s locker in the basement. When he did move upstairs, one worker complained about him using the same dressing room with the white drivers.
“I had made up my mind that that was going to happen,” Gholston said. “After it came, I just ignored it I just didn’t say anything.”
One morning, Gholston was driving through East Chattanooga to start his route when gunfire cracked the early morning darkness. A bullet struck the back of the bus. No one was injured, Gholston said.
On another occasion, rock throwers stoned Gholston’s bus in Eastdale, breaking several windows. The black passengers got off the bus and rode with the white driver, Gholston recalled. “They were afraid to ride into town with me.”
Wearing a dark blue uniform and sitting where only whites had sat, the black driver encountered many startled looks and slurs muttered behind his back. If a bus broke down, Gholston said, he couldn’t get off and call the dispatcher because people didn’t want him to use the phone.
“There were many different things that kind of made things rough for me at the time,” he said. “I went on. I kept going. I didn’t let nothing excite me.”
Gholston said he strength from his faith in God and from mother-in-law, Viola Walker, a devout woman who endured a troubled marriage.
“I looked at her many times, at how she put up with her husband,” Gholston recalled. “Many women wouldn’t have. I knew if she could live that life, I could too.”
“Meantime, she said she was praying for me. And I knew those prayers carried me through.”
Jackie Robinson, the black athlete who broke the color barrier in major-league baseball, was another source of inspiration.
“I thought about him many times going through this life,” Gholston said. “In the way that I felt, I knew what we went through… When you’re facing these things yourself, then you’ve got to be the one that stands for it. I knew when those feelings came to me what I had to do. It helped me by thinking what he and Joe Louis went through. That was the only thing that kept me from feeling alone.”
Today, Robinson’s name is often mentioned by co-workers as a measure of what Gholston accomplished through his self-disciplined example.
“Paul had a personality that was A-1,” said J.B. Starks, a black bus driver who was hired three years after Gholston. “Naturally, that made it easier, just like back when baseball got the first black player in baseball. Jackie Robinson took a lot and made it easier for the other black players.”
Instead of getting angry, Starks said, the black drivers joked about the prejudice they encountered. Gholston tells a story about a black woman who was waiting for a bus. When he drove up, the woman just stood starting at him.
“After a while, she turned around and went back,” Gholston said. “She called the dispatcher and told him a black man had taken the bus driver’s uniform. She said, “He’s driving the bus, coming toward town.”
Gholston said the hiring of other black drivers after two years made them a more familiar sight and relieved some of the pressure he felt. The racial tensions gradually subsided by the 1970s.
“It’s funny,” said Tom Dugan, executive director of CARTA. “It seems like a long time ago.”
Now, CARTA’s 70 drivers are about evenly divided between blacks and whites and no one thinks twice about it, Dugan said.
“He’s a historic Chattanoogan,” said Randy Greene, assistance executive director of CARTA. “He broke the ice around here and did something that was very difficult for him.”
Gholston is retiring this month after 29 years—25 as a driver—and 400,000 miles. The bus drivers’ union, which reportedly once asked management to hire no more blacks, is giving the senior driver a farewell party on Sunday.
“I feel fine now since I came through it,” Gholston said. “It brought a lot to my life to think about the future and what has made a change. Now I feel good. I tell some of the drivers now, ‘It’s not like it was when I was coming up. Y’all have really got it made.’”
This is a story of resilience and determination. CARTA honors Mr. Gholston for his service, faith, and perseverance for having the strength to change history and make his story.