San Francisco Woman Is Suing After Getting Kicked Off of Bus
A young woman named Toni Young has filed a lawsuit in Alameda Country Superior Court over an incident in April 2014, in which she was ordered to move to back of Greyhound bus by the bus driver.
Young claims that she boarded a San Francisco Greyhound en route to Sacramento to attend a family celebration. All was fine, until Young had to transfer buses in Oakland for he second leg of her journey.
According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, the bus driver allegedly ordered Young to move to the back because the driver was expecting an elderly passenger to get on board in Sacramento. Young replied by saying she was getting off in Sacramento so the issue was “irrelevant.” Regardless, Young decided to “comply,” and before moving back said to the bus driver that “she didn’t have to have an attitude about this,” according to Young’s attorney, Michael Adams.
The driver, Cynthia Lara, shot back that she didn’t have an attitude, and then called for security to escort Young off the bus and called her a racial slur in the process.
Young has called the experience the “most dehumanizing incident” of her entire life, and is seeking punitive damages for “psychological trauma, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety.”
The event is, understandably, being compared to what happened to Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Watch Hillary Clinton pay tribute to Park at the 60th anniversary of the Boycott last year:
(Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images for Fortune Magazine)