PART 1 An Era of Protest Challenge America, 1964. Lois Mailou Jones. Photomechanical reproduction, acrylic and paper on canvas, 1 1 39 /8 x 30 /8 in. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” — Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” 1143 Hirshhorn Museum 1143 U7P1-845481.indd 1143 4/17/06 3:09:14 PM Informational Text Preview the Article In “The Torchbearer,” former Poet Laureate Rita Dove describes how an act by Rosa Parks sparked the modern civil rights movement. 1. Think about what you already know about Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement. What else would you like The to know? 2. Read the excerpt from the poem by Rita Dove on page 1144. How do you think the author feels about Rosa Parks? How might this affect the tone Torchbearer of the article? ROSA PARKS’s simple act of protest galvanized Set a Purpose for Reading America’s civil rights revolution Read to learn how a single act of protest By RITA DOVE defined the Civil Rights movement and changed a nation. How she sat there, Reading Strategy the time right inside a place Analyzing Text Structure When you analyze text structure, or the so wrong it was ready. organization of ideas in a text, you look at separate parts of a selection in order to —From “Rosa,” in On the Bus with understand the entire work. Chronological Rosa Parks by Rita Dove order, or the time order in which events take place, is one type of text structure. Identify We know the story. One December caused so much activity, but I chronological order through dates and key evening, a woman left work and recognized the template: David slaying words such as first, then, and finally. As you boarded a bus for home. She was the giant Goliath, or the boy who read, use a chart like the one below to track tired; her feet ached. But this was saved his village by sticking his finger chronological order in “The Torchbearer.” Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, in the dike. Perhaps it is precisely the and as the bus became crowded, the lure of fairy-tale retribution that colors woman, a black woman, was ordered the lens we look back through. Parks SEQUENCE OF EVENTS to give up her seat to a white was 42 years old when she refused to Event 1 passenger. When she remained give up her seat. She has insisted that ± seated, that simple decision her feet were not aching; she was, by eventually led to the disintegration her own testimony, no more tired than Event 2 of institutionalized segregation in usual. She did not plan her fateful act: ± the South and ushered in a new era “I did not get on the bus to get of the Civil Rights movement. arrested,” she has said. “I got on the Event 3 This, anyway, was the story I had bus to go home.” heard from the time I was curious Montgomery’s segregation laws enough to eavesdrop on adult were complex: Blacks were required to conversations. I was three years old pay their fare to the driver and then when a white bus driver warned Rosa get off and reboard through the back Parks, “Well, I’m going to have you door. Sometimes the bus would drive OBJECTIVES arrested,” and she replied, “You may off before the paid-up customers made • Analyze historical context. • Analyze organizational patterns in informa- go on and do so.” As a child, I didn’t it to the back entrance. If the white tional text, including chronological order. understand how doing nothing had section was full and another white 1144 UNIT 7 1144-1146 U7P1TIME-845481.indd 1144 1/10/07 10:59:43 PM Informational Text Montgomery’s segregation laws. During a midnight meeting of the Women’s Political Council, 35,000 AP/ Wide World Photos handbills were printed for distribution to all black schools the next morning. The message was simple: “We are . asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial . You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.” Monday came. Rain threatened, yet the black population of Montgomery stayed off the buses, either walking or catching one of the black cabs stopping at every municipal Rosa getting fingerprinted bus stop for 10 cents per customer— the standard bus fare. Meanwhile, Parks was scheduled to appear in customer entered, blacks were required Mrs. Rosa Parks, seamstress for the court. She made her way through the to give up their seats and move farther Montgomery Fair department store, throngs at the courthouse, a demure to the back; a black person was not boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus. figure in a long-sleeved black dress even allowed to sit across the aisle She took a seat in the fifth row—the with white collar and cuffs, a trim from whites. These humiliations were first row of the “Colored Section.” black velvet hat, gray coat, and white compounded by the fact that two- The driver was the same one who gloves. A girl in the crowd caught thirds of the bus riders in Montgomery had put her off a bus 12 years earlier sight of her and cried out, “Oh, she’s were black. for refusing to get off and reboard so sweet. They’ve messed with the Parks was not the first to be through the back door. (“He was still wrong one now!” detained for this offense. Eight months mean-looking,” she has said.) Did Yes, indeed. The trial lasted earlier, Claudette Colvin, 15, refused that make her stubborn? Or had her 30 minutes, with the expected con- to give up her seat and was arrested. work in the NAACP sharpened her viction and penalty. That afternoon, Black activists met with this girl to sensibilities so that she knew what to the Montgomery Improvement determine if she would make a good do—or more precisely, what not to Association was formed. So as not test case. As secretary of the local do: Don’t frown, don’t struggle, don’t to ruffle any local activists’ feathers, chapter of the National Association shout, don’t pay the fine? the members elected as their for the Advancement of Colored At the news of the arrest, local civil president a relative newcomer to People (NAACP), Parks attended the rights leader E.D. Nixon exclaimed, Montgomery, the young minister meeting, where it was finally decided “My God, look what segregation has of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church: that a more “upstanding” candidate put in my hands!” Parks was not only the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. than Colvin was necessary to above moral reproach (securely That evening, addressing a crowd withstand the scrutiny of the courts married, reasonably employed), but gathered at the Holt Street Baptist and the press. Then, in October, a she possessed a quiet fortitude as well Church, King declared in that young woman named Mary Louise as political savvy. In short, she was the sonorous, ringing voice the world Smith was arrested; NAACP leaders ideal candidate for a test case. would soon thrill to: “There comes rejected her, too, as their vehicle, She was arrested on a Thursday; a time that people get tired.” When looking for someone more able to bail was posted by Clifford Durr, the he was finished, Parks stood up so withstand media scrutiny. Smith paid white lawyer whose wife had employed the audience could see her. She did the fine and was released. Parks as a seamstress. That evening, not speak; there was no need to. Six weeks later, the time was ripe. after talking it over with her mother Here I am, her silence said, among The facts, rubbed shiny for retelling, and husband, Rosa Parks agreed to you. And she has been with us ever are these: On December 1, 1955, challenge the constitutionality of since—a persistent symbol of human THE TORCHBEARER 1145 1144-1146 U7P1TIME-845481.indd 1145 4/17/06 3:13:12 PM Informational Text larger-than-life heroics. Some of the most tumultuous events, however, have been provoked by serendipity— the assassination of an unimportant archduke spawned World War I, a Brian Lanker kicked-over lantern may have sparked the Great Chicago Fire. One cannot help wondering what role Martin Luther King Jr. would have played in the civil rights movement if the opportunity had not presented itself that first evening of the boycott. What if Rosa Parks had chosen a row farther back from the outset? Or what if she had missed the bus altogether? At the beginning of this new millennium (and after a particularly noisy century), it is the modesty of Rosa alone Rosa Parks’s example that sustains us. It is no less than the belief in the power of the individual, that dignity in the face of brutal authority. in the folds of her checked dress, while cornerstone of the American Dream, The famous UPI photo (actually a white man sits, unperturbed, in the that she inspires. Her life offers the taken more than a year later, on row behind her. That clear profile, the hope that when crunch time comes, December 21, 1956, the day neat hat and eyeglasses and sensible all of us—even the least of us—could Montgomery’s public transportation coat—she could have been my mother be that brave, that serenely human.