Booted from bus: For race or safety?

Michelle Jordan alleges that when she and her 3-year-old daughter boarded a Jefferson Lines bus in Minneapolis a week ago, the driver told them to sit in the back.

"He came right directly to our seat and he said to us, "You and your daughter need to move to the back of the bus," she said this week. "I kind of felt it was because I was the only black person on the bus."

Jordan's allegations of racial bias are under investigation, said Bonnie Buchanan, Jefferson Lines' vice president for marketing and sales. Onboard videotape the company plans to further review should help determine what happened, said Buchanan, who talked to Jordan this week.

"She told me she didn't think she'd ever have a Rosa Parks moment," Buchanan said, referring to the black woman who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. "I'm sure to a person of color, hearing, 'To the back of the bus' would be very emotional."

Jordan said only six passengers boarded the bus in Minneapolis. She said that despite the driver's request to move to the back, she rode in the sixth row with her daughter until they were booted off the bus in Abbotsford, Wis., leaving them stranded outside a convenience store.

The driver told Jordan that her daughter, Gabrieal, was distracting him.

"She was singing to the doll that I bought her for her birthday," said Jordan, 41. "It's a $5 doll that plays, 'I'm a Little Teacup' over and over again."

But Rebecca Mink, a passenger who boarded in Eau Claire, Wis., said the girl ran in the aisle while her mother talked on a cell phone. "If you want my opinion, it was not a racist issue, it was a safety issue," she said.

Buchanan said Jefferson Lines, a family-owned operation, has "a strict no-tolerance policy as far as any type of discrimination" and employs several minority workers. But she also said that safety is paramount and that the driver disputes Jordan's interpretation of what happened.

"He's stating that the child was running up and down the aisle and it was not a safe situation and he repeatedly asked the mother to take control of the child and she didn't," she said.

Jordan said the driver, who didn't identify himself, called police in Abbotsford. "It was cold outside," she said. "I don't understand why he would do that to us."

Ross Rannow, the police officer who responded, said the driver told him that "he asked her to move to the rear where there were a number of open seats" because Gabrieal was running to the front of the bus.

Jefferson Lines drivers are instructed to call police to remove passengers thought to be causing trouble, she said, but she remembers only a few such instances in 30 years.

The driver, who has worked for Jefferson Lines for five years, will be questioned further when he returns from vacation, Buchanan said. She described him as "just a laid-back kind of guy."

"He's really been so good in so many ways," she said.

Buchanan said a quick look at the tape shows Gabrieal walking on the seat arms, but she said the company is reserving judgment until it can do a fuller investigation and review the entire nine-hour tape.

Jordan said that in the interest of full disclosure, she served 18 years in a Wisconsin prison for being a party to a murder. She was 17 when the killer forced her to accompany him in a car, she said. Now she's active in prison ministries, she said, and plans to study at Minnesota Community Technical College to become a surgical technician.