All Aboard

Weary and footsore, the Negro workers of Johannesburg climbed aboard the buses to ride to their jobs for the first time in twelve weeks. Their boycott had been a muted and melancholy protest against a one penny rise in fare (TIME. Feb. 25). Their inadequate diet made it hard for them to walk the 20 miles a day and also work a full shift; their low incomes left many without proper shoes or raincoats for the long trudge, yet 145,000 Negroes had honored the boycott in a demonstration of unity such as South Africa had never seen before.

The solution of the issue, on terms which hot-headed Negro leaders had rejected four weeks before, was as simple and satisfactory as the caucus race in Alice in Wonderland; i.e., everybody won. The government-subsidized bus company, which started the trouble by upping its fare from fourpence to fivepence, would go on collecting the higher fare. The thousands of Negro bus riders, commuting from the segregated locations outside the city, would continue to ride for the old price by the simple process of paying fourpence for coupons exchangeable for a fivepenny bus ticket. The difference would be taken care of by a special fund raised by the employers and merchants of Johannesburg, who cared far less for the principles involved than for the man-hours and sales they were losing in the dispute.

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