Page 70 - Exercise 1

Page 70 - Exercise 1

A bus ride into the history books

December 1,1955 started as a normal day in Montgomery, Alabama. After work, Rosa Parks got on a bus in the downtown area. First, she paid her ten-cent fare. Then, as usual, she went to the section for black passengers. In those days, the buses and other public places in several southern states in the USA were segregated. Only white people were allowed to sit in the front section of the bus. Rosa was mixed race: part African-American, part Native American and part Scots-Irish, but under the law she was black. After a few stops, a white man got on. The bus was full and he couldn’t find a seat. Rosa and three other passengers were sitting at the front of the ‘coloured’ section, and the driver, James Blake, told them to give up their seats and stand at the back. The other three passengers stood up, but Rosa refused to move. The police came. They said that they would arrest her if she didn’t move. Rosa told them that she wouldn’t give up her seat and she was arrested. Four days later, she was found guilty of breaking the law. The judge told her that she would have to pay a fine of $14.

While she was appearing in court, however, civil rights leaders organized a boycott of the buses. For 381 days the 42,000 black people of Montgomery said that they wouldn’t use the buses, There were demonstrations in the streets, too. A young preacher, called Martin Luther King, led many of these. Finally, just over a year later, the judges of the US Supreme Court said that segregation was illegal.

That wasn’t the end of the story. It took a longtime for things to change. In 1957, Rosa and her husband moved to Detroit after some people in Montgomery said that they were going to kill her. Over the next few years, hundreds of people died in demonstrations, and in 1968 Martin Luther King himself was shot. However, Rosa’s ‘No’ started a revolution that slowly changed American society. In 2008, Barack Obama became the first black person to be elected president of the USA. Unfortunately, Rosa herself didn’t live to see it. She died in 2005 at the age of 92.