Rosa Parks, My Story

How It All Started

One evening in early December 1955 I was sitting on the front seat of the colored section of a by in Montgomery ,Alabama. The white people were sitting on the white section. More white people for on, and they filled  up all the seats in the white section. When that happened,we black people were supposed to give up out seats to the whites. But I didn't move. The white driver said,"let me have those front seats." I didn't get up. I was tired of giving in to white people.
"I'm going to have you arrested ," the driver said.
"You may do that,"I answered.
Two white policemen came. I asked one of them,"Why do you have to push is around?"
I answered,"I don't know, but the law is the law and you're under arrest."
For half of my life that were laws an customs in the south that kept African Americans segregated from Caucasians and allowed white people to treat black people without any respect. I never thought this wad fair,and from the time I was child ,I tried to protest against disrespectful treatment. But it was very hard to do anything about segregation and racim when white people had the power of the law behind them.
     Somehow we had to change the laws. And we had to get enough white people in our side to be able to succeed. I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to the segregation laws in the South. I only knew that I was tired of being pushed around. I was a regular person,just as good as anybody else. There has been a few times in my life when I had been treated by white people like a regular person,so I knew what that felt like. It was time that other white people started treating me that way.

One of my earliest memories of childhood is hearing my family talk about the remarkable time that a white man treated my like a regular little girl,not not little black girl. It was right after World War I,around 1919. I was give or did years old. Moses Hudson, the owner of the plantation next to our land in Pin Level,Alabama,came out from the city of Montgomery to visit and stopped by the house. Moses Hudson had his son-in-law with him, a soldier from the North. They stopped in to visit my family. We southerners called all northerners Yankees in those days. The Yankee soldier patted me on the head and said I was such a cute little girl. Later that evening my family talked about how th Yankee soldier he treated me like I was another just a little girl,not a little black girl. In those days in the South white people didn't treat little black children the same way as littl white children. And old Moses Hudson was very uncomfortable about the way the Yanke soldier treated me. Grandfather said he saw old Mose Hudson's face turn red as a coal of fire. Grandfather laughed and laughed.

I was raised I my  grandparents' hour on Pine Level,in Montgomery County,near Montgomery,Alabama. All my mother's people came from Pine Level. My mother's name we Leona Edwards. My father came from Abbeville,Alabama. His name was James McCauley. He was a carpenter a d a builder,very skilled at brick and stonemasonry. He traveled all around guiding houses.
    My father's brother-in law,Reverend Dominick,Ain't Addie's husband, was a pastor of the Mount Zion African Methodist Esliscopal Church in Pine  Level, and it was there in Pine Level that my father met my mother, who was a teacher. They were married right there in Pine Level in April 12,1912. My mother was twenty-four years old,and my father was the same age.