Two decades before Rosa Parks brought North America’s segregated bus journeys to international attention, this was what Langston Hughes experienced in Russia: On a crowded bus, nine times out of ten, some Russian would say, ‘Negrochanski tovarish – Negro comrade – take my seat!’ On the streets queuing up for newspapers, or cigarettes, or soft drinks, often folks in the line would say, ‘Let the Negro comrade go forward’ … of all the big cities in the world I’ve ever been, the Muscovites seemed to me to be the politest of peoples to strangers.
