USA. Birmingham, Alabama. 2014. Elnora Shearer (70, right) talks to a fellow passenger on the Cherokee Bend 50 bus from downtown Birmingham to Mountain Brook. Elnora says: 'Its kind of like there has been a shrinkage. Over the past couple of years, we're becoming less and less. We're retiring, and younger people don't want to do this. They don't want to work in Mountain Brook.'
<br><br>The Cherokee Bend 50 is a public bus service in Birmingham, Alabama which is colloquially known as the 'Maids' Bus' by the local Transport Authority. It collects a group of older African-American women and drops them off, one by one, along the side of the road in the affluent suburb of Mountain Brook. From the road, the women make their way along the long driveways to the homes of their employers where they work as domestic help. Many of these women came of age in the 1960s, during the Civil Rights movement, and have been riding this same bus to work at the homes of wealthy families in Mountain Brook.