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passengers in Montgomery were frequently ordered to the rear of the bus to make way for white passengers once the whites-only section was filled to capacity. Often an entire row of black passengers was forced to stand or move rearward in order to free a single seat for a white rider, as segregation statutes prohibited a white and a black from sitting next to or even across the aisle from one another. Many Montgomery bus drivers extended this kind of discrimination to their general treatment of black passengers. Although blacks paid the same bus fare as whites, many drivers did not extend them the same courtesies. For instance, drivers always picked up white passengers at every block, but they usually picked up black passengers at every other block. Some drivers forced blacks to enter their buses through the rear door; often, a black would pay his fare to the driver up front and disembark to reenter through the back door, only to have the driver take off before he or she was able to get back on. Happy and relieved to have found a seat, Parks sat with her purse and shopping bag in her lap, thinking of the work still ahead of her at home, where she would prepare the letters she had to mail as part of her responsibilities as the volunteer secretary for the Montgomery branch of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the nation’s oldest andmost prominent civil rights organization. By now, she thought, her husband, Raymond, would already be home preparing their supper of ham and collard greens. He would be expecting her soon. On the third stop after she was aboard, the bus pulled over at the Empire Theater and six whites entered and filled the open front seats. One white man was left standing. Although he did not raise any objection and stood quietly, the driver noticed that he was without a seat. Immediately, the driver, a portly man named J.F. Blake, ordered the four blacks in the sixth row to move from the area, regarded sometimes as the neutral middle, so the white man could sit down without being in the same row as a black person. This order went beyond Montgomery’s segregation laws, but Blake exerted free reign.

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