9781422277843

Rosa Parks being processed at the police station after being arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Her arrest and subsequent fine ($10, plus $4 for court costs) led African-American bus riders and others to boycott the Montgomery city buses.

“All right, you folks, I want those seats,” he yelled back to them. (These words, quoted from David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross , represent the more polite of the many existing versions of what the bus driver said on that fateful day. According to the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, for example, in his autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down , the driver referred to the four passengers he was addressing as “niggers,” not “folks.”) For a second, nobody moved. “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats,” the driver yelled.

1 2

C I V I L R I G H T S L E A D E R S : R O S A PA R K S