Smarmoofus Spot

I wrote this early, and I’m proud of that.  Go me!  (What’s it like in the future?)

Grateful to find an open seat just behind the dividing line, she watched reserved seats fill at the next stop.  The driver noticed them sitting while their ‘betters’ stood.  “Y’all gotta do the right thing,” he said.
Others moved.
“I shouldn’t have to,” she defied.
“I’ll be callin’ the cops, then.”
“You may do that.”

Story behind the story:

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus to take her home from her work day at Montgomery Fair department store.  At the time, a city ordinance required the public bus system reserve a number of seat rows at the front of the bus for whites only.  Mrs. Parks took a seat in the first row behind that reserved section.  When the reserved area seats were all taken, additional white passengers boarded and maintained the segregation of races by standing in the forward section of the bus.  The driver saw this and, as was the custom (not law), approached the black passengers and asked them to move back so the driver could expand the “white” section of the bus, effectively giving the black passengers’ seats to white passengers.  Three black gentlemen sitting around Mrs. Parks complied.  However, Mrs. Parks was tired.  Not physically tired from her work, but emotionally drained from the repeated humiliation and subjugation black Americans had endured.  So she refused to move, the police were called, and she was arrested.  This seemingly small act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a major event in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.

Writing about this incident later, Martin Luther King, Jr.  said, “no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, ‘I can take it no longer.’”

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was born February 4, 1913 and died October 24, 2005.  Her legacy endures.

 
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