What Barbershop didn't tell you about Rosa Parks

Ebony, Feb, 2003 by Lerone Bennett, Jr.

None of this was verbalized, none of this reached the stage of consciousness; but it was there, deep in Rosa Parks' mind, as she approached the first Cleveland Avenue bus that came along. At the last moment, she noticed that this bus was crowded, and she let it go by; for she had decided in her mind that "when I got on the bus I wanted to be as comfortable as I could...." She went across the street to the drug store and got some pills for her aching neck. When she returned, she noticed "another bus approaching, and ... didn't see anybody standing up in the back. But by the time I [got] to the bus door, a number of people had gotten on ahead of me, and when I got on, the Negro section in back was well filled." There was one vacant seat in the fifth row--the first row in no-man's land--and she sank wearily into a seat next to a Black man, who was sitting by the window. The bus pulled out of Court Square and stopped at the Empire Theater. Several Whites got on and took the designated "white" seats. This left one White man standing, and the driver looked In the rear view mirror and told the four Blacks in the fifth row to get up so the White man could sit down. There must have been something in the air on this day; for at first no one moved. The driver noticed this with some surprise and raised his voice:

"Y'all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats."

At that point the man sitting next to Rosa Parks stood up, and she shifted her legs in the seat and let him pass. As she moved to the window, she noticed out of the corner of her eye that the two women across the aisle had also vacated their seats.

Now, as tension rose in the bus, the driver approached Rosa Parks and asked if she was going to move. "No," she said. The driver said that if she didn't get up, he would have to call the police.

"Go ahead and call them," Rosa Parks said.

The driver stormed to the front, pulled the ratchet and got off. Several passengers who didn't want to be inconvenienced or who didn't want to get involved followed him. The remaining passengers sat quietly, staring at "the woman who was causing all the trouble." Before too much time passed, the driver returned with two policemen, who asked Rosa Parks if she had understood the driver's request. She said yes.

"Why didn't you get up?" one of the officers asked.

"I didn't think I should have to," she replied. Then there came from deep inside her a terrible and unanswerable question.

"Why do you push us around?"

There was no answer--in the police manual, or in any book--to that question, and the officer mumbled something about the law, adding "You're under arrest."

The scene shifted now to the police station, where Rosa Parks was booked, fingerprinted, and jailed. She was permitted to make one phone call, and she used it to reach E.D. Nixon, a big-shouldered, big-framed Pullman Porter who had been the moving edge of the Montgomery protest movement for more than two decades. Nixon called a liberal White lawyer, Clifford Durr, and they went to the police station and bailed Rosa Parks out.