Photo courtesy of visitsantpaul.com

MIAMI – A 2023 incident in which a white bus driver in North Dakota forced two Black men to move to the back of the bus to allow white passengers to sit in the front sparked a racial discrimination lawsuit.

The incident swept Blacks back to the Civil Rights struggle when civil rights icon Rosa Parks was arrested in the 1950s for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama.

According to Black Enterprise News, Xavier Davis, one of the Black passengers who was forced to move to the back of the bus, filed a lawsuit along with another Black man named John Doe against the Jefferson Bus Lines company.

The company’s headquarters is located in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Minnesota Department of Human Fights investigated the incident and found probable cause for Davis and the other man to initiate the discrimination lawsuit against the company.

The driver involved in the incident is named as John Doe in the lawsuit.

Furthermore, the investigation concluded that the driver’s instructions to the Black men that company policy was for passengers to board from the back of the bus to the front was a contradiction of Jefferson Lines’ actual boarding policy and that the driver assumed the men were traveling together, despite their tickets to two different destinations.