Civil Rights Revolution: A Short Story

One wintry day on December 1st,1955, I rode the bus home from work. Normally this would be normal for me, but that day was special. It would be the start of an equal rights revolution that would change history forever. Someone had left the front seats in the black section open, and so, naturally, that is where I sat. Soon after I got on, another woman sat down in the row next to me. When she first sat down next to me, I had no idea what kind of an impact she would have on history. Once we stopped at the the theatre, herds of white people flocked onto the bus. Slowly the bus became more and more crowded, until there was one white man without a seat. “Give me those front four seats,” the bus driver shouted, looking at the four of us Despite the fact that I had dealt with this sort of thing my whole life, it still felt ridiculous that all of us in those front four seats had to get up for just one man, but I knew better than to try and resist. A cousin of mine had tried and ended up getting his house defaced, and so I got up. The woman sitting next to me, however, got up to let the man sitting next to her out and then sat back down.

Jim crow laws were very strict, and people had many ideas of how to enforce them, most involving getting beaten. After a while, the bus driver realized that she hadn’t gotten up from her seat. “Why don’t you stand up?” he said, making me feel more than a bit nervous about what was going to