White like me

In the late 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin disguised himself as a black man and traveled through the still segregated South. He chronicled his experiences in his book Black Like Me:

His indoctrination into black life began at a New Orleans bus station. When he politely asked a white clerk for bus times, "she answered rudely and glared at me with such loathing I knew I was receiving what the Negroes call 'the hate stare,'" he wrote. "This was so exaggeratedly hateful I would have been amused if I had not been so surprised." 

In another instance a white bus driver prevented the blacks on the bus, including Griffin, from getting off the bus during a rest stop in Mississippi. Griffin and the others waited in discomfort for the trip to resume.

Eddie Murphy goes undercover as a white man in a 1984 Saturday Night Live sketch that's a satirical take on Griffin's book: "I studied for my role very carefully. I watched lots of 'Dynasty'. . . .And I read a whole bunch of Hallmark cards."

When he ventures out into the world, he finds that strange and unexpected things happen on buses - things that give the term "choice riders" new meaning. (Bus scene starts at 2:35)

(thx Nick K!) (via NBC)

Miss Subways

Here's a really delightful piece from NPR's All Things Considered and Radio Diaries about the Miss Subways beauty contest that started in the 1940s:

For more than 35 years, riders on the New York City subways and buses during their daily commute were graced with posters of beaming young women. While the women featured in each poster — all New Yorkers — were billed as "average girls," they were also beauty queens in the nation's first integrated beauty contest: Miss Subways, selected each month starting in 1941 by the public and professionally photographed by the country's leading modeling agency.

The inclusion of women of color and Jewish women, particularly in those early years, is really quite remarkable.

(via All Things Considered)