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...