Bus Ride to Freedom

Submitted by Taylor Stoehr (profile)

Titles and Authors:
"A Bus to Freedom" by Rosa Parks. (The African American Book of Values: Classic Moral Stories, ed. Steven Barboza, NY, 1998, pp. 139-143).

"Refusing to Move Back" by Claudette Colvin (Freedom's Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories, ed. Ellen Levine, NY, 1993, pp. 22-30).

"Sojourner Truth" by Arthur Huff Fauset (The African American Book of Values: Classic Moral Stories, ed. Steven Barboza, NY, 1998, pp. 795-801).

"Traveling" by Grace Paley (Just As I Thought, NY, 1998, pp. 31-35).

Genre: Nonfiction
Theme: Firsthand encounters with bus segregation over a century, culminating in the famous refusal to "move to the back" by Rosa Parks
Class type: Especially good for women's groups, but has been used with men as well; probably best with mixed-race groups

Famous and not-so-famous cases of women confronting Southern segregation practices in public transportation, beginning with Sojourner Truth's experience on a streetcar in Washington, D.C. not many years after the Civil War. Claudette Colvin was a teenager in Montgomery whose experience predated Rosa Parks' by only a few months. Had she not been pregnant, she might very well have been the test case that sparked the boycott. Grace Paley's memory of her (white) mother's refusal to obey Southern segregation laws on a bus in 1927 led her to behave similarly during a trip South in the 1940s.

Suggested questions: Once students read these four accounts, you won't need to think of questions for them.

Other reading: It may be useful for the instructor to find out a little more about any of these authors who is unfamiliar. Claudette Colvin, for instance, can be researched on the Internet.