Exercise 3

Key Question: If Rosa Parks was neither the first to resist bus segregation nor new to political activism, what does it mean that her bus stance is remembered in the way that it is?

Examine the sections called “Treading the Tightrope of Jim Crow” and “Let Us Look at Jim Crow for the Criminal He Is”.

Discussion Questions:

• What kinds of political activism did Rosa Parks carry out before her bus stance?
  • How does viewing this work shift how we think about Parks’s bus stance?
• Why was the bus system in Alabama and other Southern states segregated?
• How did Viola White, Geneva Johnson, Hilliard Brooks and Epsie Worthy try to defy the norms of segregation on the bus system?
  • Why do you think their acts of resistance aren’t known in public memory in the way that Rosa Parks’s is?
• How did Parks and others rally around the case of Claudette Colvin?

Sources:

• Letter to ‘friend’ about segregation in Montgomery
• Photo of a segregated bus in Alabama
• Negro Ministers of Montgomery and Their Congregations, “To the Montgomery Public”, statement that references previous arrests like White’s, Brook’s, Colvin’s
• “Before Rosa Parks, There Was Claudette Colvin”, NPR

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