In the early twentieth century, as city councils throughout the South began passing Jim Crow segregation laws, African Americans began organizing streetcar boycotts. These boycotts, aimed at the racist new laws which required African Americans to sit in the back of the streetcar, were organized in more than twenty-five southern cities, and some lasted over a year. In some cases the boycotts were so well organized they spawned alternative transportation companies which were owned and run by African Americans. Although the boycotts failed to reverse the tide of Jim Crow legislation, the participants displayed a sophisticated understanding of their own consumer power, as well as a willingness to use that power to transform their political situation. As one African-American activist in Lynchburg, Virginia, explained the logic behind their streetcar boycott in 1906: “Let us touch to the quick the white man's pocket. 'Tis there his conscience often lies.”