When oil was discovered in the Oklahoma City area, mules were needed for work in digging slush pits, so the Harrell brothers bought mules and, in 1929, established the Yellow Transit Freight Lines to serve small manufacturers for whom freight was slow and express rates were prohibitive.

He sold the taxicab business in 1940 to Eddie Fuller, who operated the Y and Y Cab Co., and maintained ownership of the gasoline company until his death on December 3, 1942.

[26] Yellow Roadway also made forays into the international market, particularly China, expanding beyond its existing Canadian operations through Reimer.

[29] Towards the end of 2009, YRC narrowly averted having to file for bankruptcy protection by successfully persuading its bondholders to exchange their $470 million in bond notes for roughly 94% of the company's shares.

[30] Concurrent with more recent manufacturing sector growth and recovery, since the fourth quarter of 2009, YRC again began approaching a net positive balance sheet.

[37] On July 1, 2020, the U.S. Department of Treasury announced that the federal government would lend YRC Worldwide $700 million as an emergency loan under the CARES Act.

In exchange for the emergency loan, the Department of Treasury announced that U.S. taxpayers would acquire a 29.6 percent equity stake in the company.

The Department of Treasury received permission from the U.S. Congress to take ownership stakes in YRC Worldwide to ensure that taxpayer funds would not be misspent.

[38] An October 2020 report by the Congressional Oversight Commission concluded that no justifications had been provided for why YRC Worldwide was entitled to receive $700 million.

[39] In April 2022, Democrats on the Congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus released a report [40] claiming the loan violated the terms of the CARES Act, and that it resulted from lobbying and close connections with former US president Donald Trump.. YRC reportedly got the loan on national security grounds, over the objections of the Defense Department that the company's services could be replaced by better providers, and that the company was in the middle of a False Claims Act in which it was accused of overbilling the government and making false statements.

[41] Given that it had divested its international interests and refocused on North American LTL operations,[6] YRC Worldwide changed its name on February 4, 2021, this time returning to the name Yellow Corporation.

[4] While it did not immediately change the corporate structure, the renaming was part of a larger restructuring Yellow had started in 2019 with the goal of combining all of its regional LTL services into a single network by 2022.

In June 2023, a probe by the U.S. Congress found that the company should not have received the loan, as its survival was not "critical to maintaining national security".

[45][10][46] The threat of a strike by the union in June and July after the company failed to make a $50 million benefits payment to the pension fund caused uncertainty in the market, leading to freight volumes decreasing by nearly 80%.

The company's statements of low cash reserves during the union negotiations also caused other customers to move to rival carriers such as FedEx and ABF Freight.

[47] On August 6, 2023, the Yellow Corporation officially announced that the company and all of its affiliates had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the state of Delaware.

[52] On December 12, 2023, XPO, Inc. got approval to acquire 28 service centers of Yellow Corporation as a part of Chapter 11 bankruptcy for $870 million.