August 26, 2020
By KEITH RYAN CARTWRIGHT
Rutherford County Schools
Pauline “Polly” Swader was kind and caring by nature.
Her parents, Ester and Lucille Odum Gaines, raised her to be a hardworking, independent woman and, in 1962, Polly was looking for work when she responded to a job listing for bus drivers. The then 31-year-old mother of five had no idea when she was offered a job with Rutherford County Schools that following her death — 57 years later on March 29, 2019 — she would be remembered as a trailblazing pioneer.
After all, Polly was only trying to put food on the table for her family.
In the process, she became one of the first two African American women hired to drive a bus for the school district and the first African American woman to be awarded a bus contract.
Rutherford County Schools uses an owner-operator contract system to provide bus service for students.
From 1962 until 2013, Polly was in possession of several bus contracts that she ultimately transferred to her son Henry, including the historic agreement for bus No. 62.
“To give that number up, I really didn’t want to,” said her son Henry, who voluntarily terminated the contract for No. 62 and one other route this past summer. “It was very hard for me to do that because I know that she had been there from the beginning with that number. It was very emotional.”
Henry’s wife Debra added, “I wanted to swap the number with another one of our routes.”
After consulting with the Rutherford County Schools’ transportation department, the proposed switch proved to be more difficult than Debra or Henry imagined.
“We talked and it was just hard for us to see somebody else with that number,” said Debra, who could no longer hold back her emotions and began crying. “I couldn’t hear on the radio, someone saying, ‘62.’ That would have been very hard for me cause that’s where I started.”
“Just sitting here thinking about it,” Henry said, “it brings tears to my eyes because my mother loved what she was doing at the time.”
Debra agreed, and added, “She was62.”
The transportation department felt the same as the Swader family and went so far as to recommend approval from the School Board to officially retire No. 62. They did and the route was subsequently reassigned as bus No. 288.
Last week, the transportation department dispatched 287 buses on the first day of the 2020 – 2021 school year. For the first time in 58 years, bus No. 62 was not one of them.
“I realized my mother was a pioneer,” Henry said, “but she mostly was just trying to take care of us.”
#####
Polly was born June 13, 1931 and raised in the country outside of nearby Milton.
She never talked a whole lot about her childhood, but her children — Henry, John, Betty Sue, Lucy Mai and Frank — know their grandaddy was a farmer and that’s where their mother’s work ethic came from. He worked from before sunup until after sundown and, according to Henry, his mother “was right there beside him.”
She got married at an early age.
She was only 17.
The couple settled in the Walter Hill area in 1948 and 14 years later the boys were old enough to look after themselves while she went to work for the school district.
“What my understanding was — from bits and pieces that I heard — at the time, (the district desperately) needed bus drivers, so she decided for some reason that’s what she wanted to do,” Henry recalled, “she wanted to drive a school bus.
“She started driving and she just liked it so well that she stayed with it until about four years ago and then I got off into it.”
Sheila Tifford recalled, “Mrs. Polly always had a smile on her face and a heart of gold.”
At the time, the school district did not have a transportation department and Polly was offered the job and the bus contract by then superintendent M.B. Brandon and, according to the minutes from a 9 a.m. school board meeting on August 11, 1962, “the bus drivers whose names were called” were unanimously approved.
Polly then managed to work out a deal with George Law, who owned Bluebird Buses, to buy one of his used buses.
“Mom didn’t have money to do that and he trusted her,” Henry said.
Polly made payments and John recalls their mother “paying him off in a matter of four, five years.”
He joked, “They weren’t quite as expensive as they are now.”
Both brothers laughed.
She was able to afford the other buses she purchased without Law’s help. For that, neither of them laughed. Debra added, “She amazed me as far as her business savvy. … She was not only a Black bus driver, but a business owner.”
From August 1962 through May 1967, she drove a route for Bethel School, which was a Black school for first- through eighth-grade students and is now Bethel Missionary Baptist Church. Her “Sweet Homegoing Service” was held at the church — located out on old Holly Grove Road in Lascassas — following her death in 2019.
Once the district was desegregated for the 1967–1968 school year, Polly drove a route for Walter Hill Elementary.
After looking through past yearbooks, the first time Polly was photographed with her white male counterparts — Jack Lane, Jack Tomberlain and Hershel Tomberlain, who also transported students to Walter Hill — was 1971. Prior to the ’71 yearbook, Polly was photographed separately, and her photo was positioned next to her colleagues (as illustrated in the accompanying photos).
“I didn’t realize it until years later,” Henry said. “Then you get your head on straight and you look back and you think, man, my mother was a powerful woman.”
She would not only drive a bus in the morning and then again afternoon, but also worked in the cafeteria preparing and serving lunch for the students at Walter Hill. Prior to that, she cleaned houses between routes and later spent 16 years as a custodial worker in the Human Sciences Annex at Middle Tennessee State University.
She worked with a catering company and the family grocery stores in Shiloh and Walter Hill communities.
“I am very proud of my mother,” said John, the quieter and more reserved of the two brothers.
Henry added, “She was determined we were going to do the right thing in life, so as I look back and see what she was doing, she was right in the mix of it.”
Her daughter Betty Sue, who has since passed away, was also a driver.
John and Henry have made a career out of driving buses for the district and when their mother stopped driving, Polly hired Debra to drive bus No. 62.
“When I heard it might be retired, it brought joy. I thought, the county can be no more grateful to me,” said Henry, who cried when he called his brother John with the news. “If she knew this was happening, it would bring a smile to her face.”
“It brought a lot of memories back for me,” said John, who like his brother teared up, “I have mixed emotions because it brought back so much stuff for me, but I’m happy that’s what they decided to do.”
Henry concluded, “My mother loved being a (bus) contractor, being a bus operator and driver. My mother loved that — yes, she did. … She was just doing the right thing not knowing this would happen later on.”
PARTIAL TIMELINE OF CIVIL RIGHTS EVENTS IN 1960s
1960
- On February 1, in neighboring North Carolina, a group of four college students took a stand against segregation and refused to leave a Greensboro Woolworth counter without being served.
1961
- Seven Black and six white activists — known as the Freedom Riders — boarded a Greyhound bus, in Washington, D.C., and toured the South in protest of segregated bus terminals. Along the way, in Anniston, Alabama, the activists barely escaped the burning of their original bus and were badly beaten. Attorney General Robert Kennedy helped to secure a new bus and driver along with a police escort to Montgomery, Alabama, where the Freedom Riders were brutally attacked a second time. Kennedy then arranged for federal marshals to escort the bus to its final destination, Jackson, Mississippi, where they were arrested for trespassing a “white’s only” facility. Their convictions were eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
1962
- Pauline “Polly” Swader is one of the first two Black women to drive a school bus for Rutherford County and the first to receive a contract. In 2020, a year after her passing, Rutherford County Schools retires historic bus No. 62.
1963
- Activist Medgar Evers is assassinated in his driveway, in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 12 and, five months later, President John F. Kennedy is assassinated, in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1969.
- On August 28, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famous “I have a dream” speech as part of the March on Washington, which drew more than 200,000 spectators of all ethnicities.
1964
- Freedom Summer (otherwise known as Mississippi Summer Project) was a volunteer campaign to register Black voters in Mississippi.
- On July 2, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.
1965
- On March 7, the Civil Rights Movement turned violent on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in an event that has come to be known as Bloody Sunday. More than 600 demonstrators had planned a peaceful march from Selma, Alabama to the state’s capital of Montgomery to protest the killing of Black activist Jimmie Lee Jackson. They did not get far when they were confronted by state troopers after crossing the bridge. Television cameras captured the confrontation in its entirety.
- On June 6, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Right Act of 1965 into law.
1967
- In October, Thurgood Marshall becomes first African American Supreme Court Justice.
1968
- Martin Luther King Jr., who was in Memphis, Tennessee, to meet with striking sanitation workers, is assassinated on April 4 and, just two months later, on June 6, Robert Kennedy is assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel moments after delivering a victory speech following the California primary for the Democratic nomination for President.
PHOTOS PROVIDED / 1970 and '71 WALTER HILL YEARBOOKS