9781422277843

As long as the separate facilities provided for blacks were equal to those provided for whites, the Supreme Court had ruled in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson , the states were free to enact these so-called Jim Crow laws. Of course, in practice, black facilities were never equal, and segregation served exactly the purpose that its creators intended—to enforce upon blacks the constant message that they were second-class citizens. KNOWING HER PLACE When the Cleveland Avenue bus pulled over to its stop at Court Square on that warm Thursday afternoon in 1955, Rosa Parks noticed that there were passengers standing inside, so she let the bus pass her by with the hope that the next one would be less crowded. While she waited for it to come along, she crossed the street and did some shopping. When she returned to the squarewith her shopping bag, a Cleveland Avenue bus stopped. Since no one appeared to be standing inside, she paid the ten-cent fare, boarded, and sat down in the first vacant seat she saw, the eleventh seat back, on the aisle, immediately behind thewhites-only section of the bus. A blackman occupied the window seat to her right; two black women sat in the seats across the aisle to her left. The first 10 seats of every Montgomery city bus were reserved for white people only. Even if, as frequently happened, the bus was filled with only black passengers, to the extent that people were standing in the aisles, blacks were not to use these seats. (This differed from the practice in most other southern cities, where blacks would fill seats from the rear forward and whites from the front back; if no white passengers boarded on a particular route, blacks could occupy every seat on the bus.) Under the letter of the Montgomery city law, blacks could sit anywhere behind this whites-only section; they could be compelled to surrender their seat for a white passenger only if another was available. Alabama state law, however, gave bus drivers virtually unlimited discretion in enforcing segregation on their buses, and black

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