National Affairs 1956: Rosa Parks, Wreck of the Andrea Doria

Alabama Double-Edged Blade; Disasters Against the Sea

ALABAMA Double-Edged Blade

On Dec. 1, 1955 Mrs. Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old Negro seamstress, was ordered by a Montgomery City Lines bus driver to get up and make way for some white passengers. She refused, was arrested and fined $10 under an Alabama law making it a misdemeanor for any person to disobey a bus driver's seating instructions. But that was not the last of the Rosa Parks case: it has since been used to prove that economic reprisal, as advocated against Negroes by the white Citizens' Councils of the South, is a double-edged blade.

Within 48 hours after Rosa Parks...

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