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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — One hundred and twenty-four years ago today, at about 7 p.m., Mary Custis Lee was arrested on an Alexandria streetcar. She was 66, the eldest daughter of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, and her offense was sitting in the section reserved for Black passengers.
Lee had boarded the Washington, Alexandria and Mount Vernon Electric Railway in Washington, D.C., carrying many bags. Some accounts say she was traveling with her Black maid. She sat near the rear to make exiting easier at her stop. The conductor, Thomas Chauncey, explained the Virginia law requiring Black and white passengers to sit in separate sections and asked her to move. Lee claimed she did not know the law and protested. Chauncey allowed her to stay.
At the next stop, a Black man boarded. Chauncey told Lee she was "occupying a seat to which he was entitled under the law" and asked her again to move to the front section. She refused.
Lee was taken to the Alexandria police station and released on a personal bond. She never appeared for her court hearing the next day. Shortly afterward, she left for France, where she lived until the outbreak of World War I.
Alexandria's streetcar segregation laws
When Mary Custis Lee broke the law that night, she did so in a city that was an early adopter of strict racial segregation. In 1902, Alexandria and Fairfax were the only two localities in Virginia that mandated separate seating for Black and white passengers on streetcars. Statewide segregation on rail lines did not come until 1906. The U.S. Supreme Court had handed down Plessy v. Ferguson, establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine, just six years earlier.
In other words: Lee's arrest happened at a moment when the Jim Crow legal architecture of the South was still being built, statute by statute and case by case.
The question of intent
Historians have debated for more than a century what Mary Custis Lee meant by her refusal. Some accounts emphasize the practical explanation she gave The Evening Star — she "knew nothing about the law requiring the separation of white and colored passengers." Others, including the Boundary Stones history project at WETA, note that she was traveling with her Black maid and could plainly see what segregation meant in human terms.
Mary P. Coulling's biography, "The Lee Girls," describes Mary Custis Lee as "bossy" and "stern," a woman who insisted on her own way and was known for arguing. She had remained distant from the Lee family for much of her life and missed the funerals of both her parents and her sisters.
What's beyond dispute is the irony at the heart of the story: the daughter of the Confederate Army's most famous general was arrested for refusing to enforce a racial line her father's cause had fought to preserve. The Evening Star reported that at the police station, "gray-haired men, many of whom had doubtless served under her father," protested her arrest.
A note on Rosa Parks
The arrest came 53 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on Dec. 1, 1955. The two incidents are not analogous — Parks was a trained civil rights activist working with an organized movement; Lee was a wealthy white woman whose motives remain unclear. But the surface details rhyme: a woman refusing to move, a conductor enforcing a Jim Crow law, an arrest that drew public attention. The difference is that Parks' refusal sparked a movement. Lee's didn't change anything.
Alexandria's streetcar segregation remained on the books. Statewide segregation expanded. The legal architecture of Jim Crow held in Virginia until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Mary Custis Lee died Nov. 22, 1918, at age 83, in Hot Springs, Virginia. She is buried at University Chapel at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, the school named in part for her father.
Also on this day: Alexandria businessmen petition to repeal Prohibition
Thirty-one years later, on June 13, 1933, a group of Alexandria businessmen presented a petition to the Alexandria City Council urging the repeal of the city's ban on beer sales. Three months earlier, President Franklin Roosevelt had signed an amendment to the Volstead Act legalizing the sale of beer and light wines nationally. Alexandria's customers and revenue were heading to neighboring jurisdictions where alcohol was legal.
The petition worked quickly. Sixteen days later, on June 29, 1933, the Alexandria City Council formally repealed the city's Prohibition laws, making Alexandria one of the first Virginia cities to legalize beer again — even though state Prohibition would remain in effect for another four months. Statewide Prohibition ended in October 1933, and the 21st Amendment was ratified Dec. 5, 1933.
Information via the City of Alexandria's Office of Historic Alexandria, Boundary Stones (WETA), The New York Times (June 14, 1902), The Evening Star, "The Lee Girls" by Mary P. Coulling, and the Library of Virginia.
