INCIDENT ON THE BUS

I’ve written before about riding the city buses to town. It was a method of transportation I used often when I was a child and even into my teens. And it was in the segregated bus that I rebelled against the system in a very small way.

The bus had a front door that was the entrance and a side back door that was the exit. Behind the exit were two rows of two-seaters and one long seat across the back. These back rows behind the exit were where the black people were to sit. If the bus was really crowded, the whites just moved on back and took up all the seats except for the long back one. It didn’t matter to them that the blacks had to stand; they were just interested in getting their own seats.

One day a friend and I boarded the bus on West End, heading to town. The bus was practically filled up with white people; the only seats available were on the very last row. At one end of the row were one or two black people, but the other end was free. So we decided to sit there until more African Americans got on and then of course, we would give up our seats to them. There was a man in front of us (who was actually in a seat reserved for “coloreds”) and he kept turning around and looking at us with a frown on his face. I knew what he was upset about and it wasn’t that we were taking the black people’s seats.

Sure enough, in a few stops two AA’s got on the bus and right when we noticed them, the man in front of us turned around and said in a nasty tone, “You all are going to have to move; you can’t sit with them.”

We were already starting to rise so I said to him, “We’re moving because these are their seats, not because we don’t want to sit next to them.” Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have had that much nerve to speak that way to an adult, but I was so angry, it just slipped out. We quickly made our way toward the front to stand in order to be away from him. He was the kind who might send the KKK after us.

Perhaps, you can understand why Rosa Parks is such a hero to me.