A Bus for Martin Luther King
Balanga
Early 20th century in the U.S. South. Segregation against the black community is rife. The Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws—all this finds form in daily life via ethnic separation in public places, schools, public transport, public drinking fountains, and on and on. In buses, for example, seats at the front are reserved for whites. Rosa Parks, a seamstress, lives in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, and has suffered from this social context ever since childhood. On December 1, 1955, she refuses to obey the driver of the bus she is on and give up her seat to a white passenger as laid down by the law. Arrested and jailed, she becomes the symbol of the Afro-American cause, and a young pastor, Martin Luther King, seizes on the event and starts a boycott of the city’s buses. Demonstrations, speeches—the protest movement grows and grows, and Rosa Parks becomes the “mother of the Civil Rights movement”. The machine is on the move, and nothing can stop it now. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court bans segregationist laws on the buses, declaring them unconstitutional. The “woman who stood up by sitting down” changed the history of the United States.