MINNEAPOLIS — Two years ago, Xavier Davis was boarding a Jefferson Lines bus to ride home from North Dakota to Minnesota when the driver told Davis and another passenger they needed to ride in the back of the bus.

Both passengers were Black men.

An argument ensued and the driver threatened to call the cops if the two men didn’t move to the back and sit down. The men, who did not know each other, did so.

Four months later, Davis initiated a Minnesota Department of Human Rights investigation. A memorandum filed earlier this year by Commissioner Rebecca Lucero found probable cause the driver discriminated against the passengers because of their race.

This week, Davis filed a civil lawsuit against Jefferson Lines and the driver in Hennepin County District Court.

Lucero wrote in her memo that Jefferson Lines and the driver failed to give any reason that wasn’t racially discriminatory for forcing Davis and the other passenger to ride in the back of the bus.

She said the investigation showed the driver let white passengers sit where they wanted and that making the two Black passengers sit in the back of the bus was “evidenced by the racially discriminatory stereotypes underlying the interaction.”

The driver, who was identified as John Doe in the lawsuit, gave several arguments for why the passengers needed to sit in the back of the bus.

Jefferson Lines policy was to board the bus on a first come, first serve basis, but the driver told the Black passengers that company policy was to board from the back of the bus to the front.

The driver also thought the two passengers were travelling together, even though their tickets were for different destinations, and he later stated that the passengers smelled like marijuana. After the situation became argumentative, the driver threatened to involve law enforcement.

In her memo, Lucero wrote that all of these actions by the bus driver were “rooted in discriminatory and stereotypical expectations” including that two Black people must be travelling together and that “Black men are more likely to smoke cannabis or engage in illegal behavior.”

“Driver’s implication that he might need to involve the police was rooted in the trope that a Black man questioning Driver’s decision was somehow threatening or disruptive,” Lucero wrote. “There was no evidence that [Davis] engaged in any activity that would warrant police intervention.”

During the course of the investigation, Jefferson Lines asked the driver to complete an incident report. The driver defended his reasons for asking the Black passengers to sit in the back of the bus. He pointed to the smell of marijuana and that he preferred passengers board from the back because on different routes he noticed passengers didn’t like when they were bumped with luggage by other passengers walking down the aisle.

One month after the incident, Jefferson Lines issued the driver a verbal warning for his behavior of deviating from the company’s seating policy.

Davis is seeking damages based on being denied full and equal enjoyment of public accommodations. The lawsuit argues the discrimination is especially abhorrent because of the well known civil disobedience of Rosa Parks, whose protest and subsequent arrest for not sitting in the back of a National City Lines bus in Montgomery, Alabama helped spark the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s.

Sam Savage, the attorney representing Davis, said that since the human rights investigation was completed, Davis and Jefferson Lines have been in mediation to try and settle their dispute.

“They just are unwilling to do the right thing,” Savage said.

One of the largest bus companies in the United States, Jefferson Lines is based in Minneapolis and operates in 14 states. Its chairman, Charlie Zelle, is also chair of the Metropolitan Council.

Messages for comment were left with Zelle and attorney Tracey Donesky, who is representing Jefferson Lines.

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