The Baton Rouge bus boycott was a boycott of city buses launched on June 19, 1953 by African-American residents of Baton Rouge, Louisiana who were seeking integration of the system. They made up about 80% of the ridership of the city buses in the early 1950s but, under Jim Crow rules, black people were forced to sit in the back of the bus, even when the front of the bus was empty. State laws prohibited black citizens from owning private buses outside the city systems.