When President Eisenhower let it be known that he wished to integrate Washington, D.C., cries went up declaring it a Jim Crow town! Journalist Howard Whitman (1914 - 1975) found this to be curious, and he began investigating just how tough a time the President would have tearing down the walls of segregation in the Nation's Capital:
"I put the question point-blank to J.A.B. Broadwater, president of [the privately-owned streetcar and bus company] Capital Transit.
"We have no objection to Negro operators on race grounds, none whatever," he said.
"Then why don't you hire any?" I asked.
"We did," he replied. "We tried some years ago. We hired several Negroes to be operators and had them in training. Then we put the first one out on the line and what happened? The white operators refused to work."
