# Safe Bus Company *Black jitney drivers in Winston-Salem built Safe Bus Company into a full-scale transit system so their community could ride with dignity, safety, and control under Jim Crow.* > Black's Encyclopedia — the sourced record of Black American life. > Portal: History & Migration · Status: In review · Revised: July 24, 2026 · Revisions: 1 > Canonical: https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/safe-bus-company ## Questions this record answers - How did the Safe Bus Company let Black riders avoid Jim Crow humiliation on city buses? - Who founded the Safe Bus Company and how big did it become? - How did segregation and later integration shape the rise and fall of the Safe Bus Company? - Was Safe Bus the first or largest Black-owned bus company in the United States? ## Summary The Safe Bus Company was a Black-owned transit system in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, created so Black workers and families could ride without Jim Crow humiliation and reach jobs and neighborhoods white-run lines refused to serve. Founded in 1926 by a collective of Black jitney drivers and businessmen, it grew into a full bus network that carried thousands of passengers a day and operated as an independent, Black-run public utility until its assets were absorbed into the city system in 1972. ## The archive's standing Safe Bus Company stands as one of the clearest examples of Black communities answering segregation not with withdrawal but with infrastructure of their own, turning mobility into a field of enterprise and self-respect. It shows that where white-owned systems wrote Black riders into the back of the bus, Black owners built a system with dignity as its operating rule. The archive holds Safe Bus as a landmark in Black business history and in the long struggle to control the terms of everyday movement, work, and public space. Its quiet absorption into the city system marks not a failure but the long, underacknowledged imprint of Black-built transit on Winston-Salem’s modern public transportation. ## Origins under Jim Crow The Safe Bus Company emerged in East Winston during the mid-1920s, when Winston-Salem’s white-owned trolley and bus routes ran to major employers and white neighborhoods but largely bypassed Black residential areas, forcing long walks and dependence on segregated systems that degraded Black riders. A cluster of Black “jitney” operators—drivers running informal car and truck routes for Black workers, especially to the tobacco factories—recognized that their scattered services could be consolidated into a stable, community-owned transit company. On April 24, 1926, under the leadership of Clarence T. Woodland, 21 Black jitney operators met to organize a formal transportation enterprise focused on Black neighborhoods that the city’s streetcars and buses did not adequately serve. Within weeks, 13 African American businessmen from Winston-Salem pooled their savings to purchase stock in the new company, reportedly raising capital on the order of tens of thousands of dollars—at a time when legal segregation, credit discrimination, and low wages made such capital formation extraordinarily difficult for Black Southerners. On May 26, 1926, they chartered the Safe Bus Company, deliberately naming it for “safety” to signal both physical reliability and protection from the humiliations of Jim Crow. ## Building a Black-owned transit network From the outset, Safe Bus operated as a full-scale transit network rather than a small side business, running regular routes into East Winston and other predominantly Black areas, carrying workers to the major tobacco plants and other employers, and offering everyday mobility for shopping, school, church, and social life. Riders remembered that on Safe Bus “we didn’t have to ride in the back,” an everyday statement of what it meant to board a vehicle owned and operated by people who shared their community and rejected the ritualized degradation of segregated seating. Over the following decades, Safe Bus expanded its fleet, staff, and service territory. Oral histories and later research describe the company at its height running dozens of buses, employing scores of Black drivers and mechanics, and carrying as many as 8,000 passengers per day—making it, by mid-century, the largest Black-owned transportation company in the United States. The company’s motto, often remembered as “Safety and Service,” captured its dual mission: to move people reliably and to uphold Black dignity in motion. Its buses became familiar fixtures on Winston-Salem’s streets, a visible sign that Black enterprise could supply what the city’s public franchises withheld. ## Business, employment, and community power Safe Bus was not only a transit provider but also a major Black employer and business institution. It created stable driving, maintenance, administrative, and managerial jobs in an era when most Black workers were confined to low-wage positions in tobacco factories, domestic service, and other labor-intensive sectors. Ownership shares and leadership roles in the company gave Black businessmen and workers a stake in physical infrastructure—roads, vehicles, depots—that municipalities usually controlled without Black input. The company’s operations strengthened neighborhood institutions: buses transported congregants to church, students to schools, and shoppers to Black-owned businesses, knitting together the economic and social life of East Winston. As riders and former employees later told interviewers, Safe Bus was a source of pride, a place where young people saw Black adults in uniform and in charge, and where the routine of catching the bus was also a routine of being respected. Through fare structures and route choices, the company made daily judgments about whose movement mattered and how much it should cost, effectively giving Black residents a say—through their own institution—in the geography of work and home. ## Responding to segregation, then to integration Safe Bus was born directly out of the exclusions of Jim Crow transit: when the city and private franchises refused to extend lines into Black neighborhoods or treated Black riders as second-class, Black entrepreneurs created an alternative system that did not rely on white approval. In that sense, Safe Bus did not simply endure segregation; it turned segregation’s economic and geographic distortions into the basis for independent enterprise that served Black needs first. The company operated under state and municipal regulations that still enforced racial hierarchies, but inside its buses the seating, service, and atmosphere were defined by Black community norms rather than white supremacy. Over time, the legal architecture of Jim Crow began to shift. As formal desegregation of public accommodations spread and cities reconsidered their transit systems, the separate Black-owned network that had been necessary under segregation faced a paradox: the same legal changes that opened white-run systems to Black riders also paved the way for municipal takeover of Black-owned infrastructure. In 1972, the City of Winston-Salem purchased the assets of Safe Bus and folded its operations into the Winston-Salem Transit Authority, retaining many of its staff but ending its run as an independent Black-owned company. For former riders and employees, the merger ensured continued service but also marked the quiet disappearance of a uniquely Black-built institution from the city’s corporate landscape. ## Legacy and place in Black transit history The story of Safe Bus Company sits within a broader tradition of Black-owned transit ventures that answered segregation with mobility on Black terms, including earlier experiments like the Union Transportation Company in Nashville. What distinguishes Safe Bus is its scale, longevity, and integration into the daily life of a mid-sized Southern city for nearly half a century. Long after streetcar boycotts and early challenges to transit segregation had faded, Safe Bus kept running routes that white-owned companies would not, and kept putting Black drivers, mechanics, and managers in visible, authoritative roles. Today, the legacy of Safe Bus is preserved through local histories, state transportation commemorations, and oral testimonies from riders and employees, some housed in North Carolina archival collections and African American history projects. Exhibits and public history pieces recall its buses as symbols of community resilience and entrepreneurship; more importantly, the company’s imprint lives on in the routes, garages, and organizational knowledge that the Winston-Salem Transit Authority inherited. For Black transit history, Safe Bus is a cornerstone case showing that Black communities did not merely ride through segregation—they owned the vehicles, built the companies, and wrote their own terms for being carried through the city. ## Sources 1. N.C. Department of Transportation, Civil Rights Division, "The Safe Bus Company operated in the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina from 1926 to 1972," Black History Month Employee Spotlights (PDF), Tennessee Department of Transportation, c. 2010s, pp. 11–12. 2. Black History Heroes, "The Safe Bus Company: A Legacy of Black Entrepreneurship in Winston-Salem," BlackHistoryHeroes.com, 2025. 3. WFDD (Willie Moore interview), "1920s Black-owned Safe Bus: 'We didn't have to ride in the back'," WUNC/WFDD, 23 February 2022. 4. AAHIAH, "The Bus Company Jim Crow Built," video essay, YouTube, c. 2020s. 5. North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, oral history and community exhibits referencing Safe Bus Company, housed in state and local archives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. ## Related records - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/union-transportation-company - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/jim-crow-laws - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/winston-salem-transit-authority - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/black-owned-businesses - https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/transportation-discrimination --- Cite as: Black's Encyclopedia, "Safe Bus Company," revised July 24, 2026. https://www.blacksencyclopedia.com/record/safe-bus-company Text under the Black's Record License: cite the record, keep attribution attached, cite the revision date.