July 12, 2025
A racial discrimination lawsuit against an unnamed Jefferson Lines bus driver is now moving forward.
A racial discrimination lawsuit against an unnamed Jefferson Lines bus driver in North Dakota is moving forward after the Minnesota Department of Human Rights found probable cause to support passenger Xavier Davis’s claims stemming from a 2023 incident aboard the bus.
According to The Minnesota Star-Tribune, four months after the incident occurred, Davis initiated a complaint to the state human rights department. Per a memo released earlier in 2025 by Commissioner Rebecca Lucero, the discrimination lawsuit against Jefferson Bus Lines, which mentions the aforementioned driver as a John Doe, has her blessing to move forward.
In her memorandum, Lucero said that the driver failed to establish any reason for instructing Davis and another Black male passenger to move to the back of the bus that was not racially discriminatory.
Her investigation also discovered that in contrast to the two Black men, the driver allowed white passengers to sit anywhere they liked, but forced these two Black men to the back of the bus.
Furthermore, the investigation concluded that the driver’s instructions to the Black men that company policy was for passengers to board from the back of the bus to the front was a contradiction of Jefferson Lines’ actual boarding policy and that the driver assumed the men were traveling together, despite their tickets to two different destinations.
The driver also claimed in a subsequent investigation conducted by the bus line that the passengers had an aroma of marijuana, and once the situation between the three men turned contentious, he threatened to call the police on the two men.
In their investigation, the company only reprimanded the driver for failing to follow the company’s boarding policy and did not address the discrimination concerns.
Although the bus company was operating in North Dakota at the time of the incident, it is based in Minnesota, and thus falls under the jurisdiction of Minnesota state officials.
Davis’ civil lawsuit, recently filed in Hennepin County District Court, draws comparisons to the treatment of Rosa Parks, who famously refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus, sparking the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Davis is seeking damages pertaining to being denied full and equal use of public accommodations in his lawsuit, and his lawyer, Sam Savage, told the outlet that Davis and the bus company had been in mediation to resolve their dispute, but indicated to the outlet that the company has been less than coöperative.
“They just are unwilling to do the right thing,” Savage told the Minnesota Star-Tribune.
In a separate statement, Savage invoked Parks’ 1955 protest to KARE 11.
“In 1955 Rosa Parks took a stand and we are not going back, not ever again and they are refusing to take accountability and the only thing we can do is make it right by awarding him full money justice. That’s the only justice available,” Savage said.
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