LA: How Freddie Sawyer Jr. made history as New Orleans’ first Black bus driver

When Sean Sawyer had to write a paper for Black History Month as an elementary school student in the 1970s, he turned to his family for advice.

“You should write about your daddy,” his maternal grandfather told him. “He was the first Black bus driver.”

Sawyer decided to pick someone else.

“I didn’t think too much of it at the time,” he said in a recent interview. “But as I got older, I really wish I would have.”

In 1961, Sawyer’s father, Freddie Sawyer, Jr., stepped behind the wheel of a city bus and broke the color barrier as the first Black bus driver employed by the New Orleans Public Service, Inc., the predecessor to the Regional Transit Authority.

A picture of Sawyer, then 22 years old, appeared in the newspaper, alongside an article in which the civil rights leader Avery C. Alexander called his hiring a “history-making move in the right direction.”

Looking back on that time of his life isn’t easy, Freddie Sawyer Jr. said in a recent interview at his home in New Orleans East, just days before his 87th birthday.

“I hated to go to work, but I had to go,” he said. “People didn’t want me out there. But I went anyway.”

Making history

Freddie Sawyer Jr. was born on March 14, 1939 in Bogalusa, Louisiana, where his New Orleans mother went to give birth. He grew up in what was then known as the Magnolia Projects in the 11th Ward.

It was some of the better housing available, he said. There was running water, a bathtub and windows you could open. He calls it “Magnolia Heights.”

He went to high school at Walter L. Cohen and later Samuel J. Green and was on a summer break from Dillard University, where he was training to become a teacher and coach, when he got a job at NOPSI in 1960, first in the maintenance department. The low-level role was one of the only jobs NOPSI allowed Black workers at the time.

But he became a driver there in 1961 after a local civil rights group, the Consumers League of New Orleans, threatened to boycott the transit agency to protest its hiring practices.

His promotion came only a few years after a federal judge in 1958 ordered New Orleans to desegregate its streetcars and buses. Until then, a moveable, wooden sign reading "For Colored Patrons Only" separated passengers.

After the newspaper story ran with his picture, Black residents lined the streets to catch a glimpse of him driving and cheer him on.

But his new job nearly cost him his life.

His first route was the St. Claude Avenue line, which ended at Domino Sugar’s Chalmette refinery in St. Bernard Parish.

On Mardi Gras night in 1962, while turning the bus around near the refinery, a man stepped out and fired a shotgun. The buckshot barely missed him.

For the rest of his time on that route, the New Orleans Police Department assigned a private detective to ride with him.

Sometimes, he wore a baseball mitt to catch fares that White passengers threw at him to avoid touching him.

He had to use separate water fountains and restrooms.

He picked his bus routes based on where he could use the bathroom. Louisiana Avenue and Calliope Street were at the top of the list. Other times he’d have to “go check the tires out” and relieve himself behind the bus.

“But I made it, you know. I hung in there,” Sawyer said. “What was I going to do. Have no job?”

‘A trailblazer’

At 87 years old, Sawyer says he’s still hanging in there. He retired from the RTA in 2001, after 41 years on the job.

Wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt, Sawyer shuffled through his living room in his New Orleans East home as a TV blared from another room.

A sign outside with an image of a handgun warns would-be intruders to "get right with Jesus" and "tell him you're on your way."

Above his couch hangs a copy of the 1961 newspaper story that featured his picture. He said didn’t know he was going to be photographed, explaining the surprised look on his face.

A framed portrait of The Times-Picayune front page featuring President Barack Obama sat on a chair nearby.

In February, the Regional Transit Authority and New Orleans City Council honored Sawyer as part of Black History Month.

District D Councilmember Eugene Green, who sponsored the council resolution, noted that Sawyer faced “many, many challenges, some of which we can’t even understand today.”

“But the fact that he withstood those challenges and was a beacon of hope to a lot of others who wanted to have the same sort of employment is something that we should be celebrating all the time,” Green added.

RTA CEO Lona Edwards Hankins described him as a “trailblazer whose courage and determination helped reshape the landscape of public transportation in our city.”

As a child, Sean Sawyer mostly heard about his father’s story from other family members. “He didn’t really talk to me about it,” said the younger Sawyer, who shares the same birthday as his father and who is also an RTA bus driver, following in his father’s footsteps.

But, he said, it's a story everyone should know.

"Every person of color who was the first one of anything should be known," Sean Sawyer said. "The story should be told."

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