AMERICAN NOTES: Memory of a Bus

Twenty years ago last week, Rosa Parks boarded a bus in Montgomery, Ala. "My only concern," she recalls, "was to get home after a hard day's work." When the driver ordered her to give up her seat to a white who was standing, she refused. From that spontaneous act of defiance sprang the boy cott of the Montgomery bus system, the leadership of Martin Luther King and, it can be said, the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks returned last weekend to Montgomery from Detroit, where she now lives, to take part in a 20th anniversary celebration. The buses were once...

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