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In reply to the discussion: Charges dropped against Newton County homebuyers [View all]freshwest
(53,661 posts)I remember when Rosa Parks was arrested for daring to sit down on a bus against orders to do so. I was a few states away, but in the South, and was angry, although I may not have heard it correctly.
I heard she was an older woman, told to give up her seat for a white man. For the color of her skin with no respect to gender or age. Just that very last layer of pigment, and nothing more!
Where I lived, a man gave up his seat for a woman or a girl. And a younger person gave up their seat for an older person, male or female. I recall when blacks sat at the back of the bus. But there was custom for the whites in the front to do as I explained here.
There wasn't a conflict over seats, because people migrated to one end or the other of the bus without being ordered. But in the case that we ran out of seats, the rules I've stated applied.
So I asked, what is a MAN doing having a WOMAN get up, and not only that an OLD WOMAN give him her seat when he is well able to stand? I mean things have changed since then, but that how it was back then.
If I'd been there, she could have had my seat. It took a while for me to know just how things were, asking my family what in the world was going on. And they told me a lot of things about the South, the KKK, the lynchings, the poll taxes and tests to stop blacks from voting, the fraternity pranks of white men going out and raping black women, the replacement for the plantation system whichwas the sharecroppers, etc.
The patience and religion of AAs amazed me, and I knew plenty who clearly saw ME as a human being, despite all of that history, which is what some white people seem unwilling to do, still.
And guess what, when the blacks started sitting at the front of the bus, I was glad. I always hated sitting in the front and I went with my friends to the back and starting cutting up and laughing since we weren't under the evil eye of the bus driver. LOL.