Mind Chatter: For Rosa Parks
Her name: Rosa Parks
The day: one
The year: 1955
The month: December
The place: Montgomery, Alabama
Rosa: she tired she say
She tired when she board the bus
Walked down the center aisle—tired,
Sat (in the first of the last ten pairs of seats)
Tired.
Fable Go:
Black folks couldn’t ride up front
Black folks seats in back of the bus
They just like bugs
Sit ’em in the back of the bus, so
Tired, tired Rosa—she sit down in the back of the bus
Bus got crowded
Driver tell black folks sitting
In the first of the last ten pairs of seats
To stand—“make it light on yourselves—stand!”
Rosa ain’t stand
(ain’t make it light)
Fable go:
King say:
“Rosa Parks anchored [anchored]
by accumulated indignities of
days gone by, the boundless
aspirations of generations yet unborn.”
King say:
“Rosa Parks a victim (a victim)
of the forces of destiny.”
King say:
“When the cup of endurance runs over,
The human personality cries out.”
Rosa Parks, she cry out, she cry
For the black African brought on
A slave ship—packed like
sardines in stale water
She cry, she cry out so
I can sit on the bus
She cry; she get arrested
She get fingerprinted
She quiet
Fable go:
I’m just a poor…stranger
Traveling through this world of woe
Rosa Parks tired; black folks tired
She found guilty on 5 December 1955
Black folks tired; they start the boycott
Cause they tired
My mama tired, too
She in the boycott
Yo mama tired, too
She in the boycott
Yo mama, yo daddy in it, too
They walk. They don’t catch the bus
They crawl; they don’t catch the bus
They walk. For over a year;
They go to court, keep
Going to court.
The court get some sense
Fable go:
June 1956 Montgomery Court say:
Back of the bus sitting for black folk ain’t right.
November 1956 Untied States Supreme Court say:
Back of bus sitting for black folk ain’t right
Rosa Parks stopped walking
Black folks stopped walking
White folks stopped walking, too
Rosa Parks get some rest
Black folks get some rest
White folks—they get some rest, too
Dr. Ramona L. Hyman is a writer, speaker, and professor “whose words are powerful memories for us to walk in the 21st century,” says Sonia Sanchez. Presently, Hyman serves as Chair and Professor of the Department of English and Foreign Languages at Oakwood University. Dr. Hyman is a graduate of Temple University (BA), Andrews University (MA), and earned her PhD from the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. She is the author of I Am Black America. Of her literary work, African American critic Dr. Joyce Joyce says, “Hyman challenges audiences to explore a poetic imagination grounded in a feel for the southern landscape, African-American literary and political history, Black spirituality, and a creative fusion of Black folk speech with a Euro-American poetic vernacular. Dr. Ramona L. Hyman emerges as a strong Black intellectual poetic voice.”
Image: Rosa Parks being fingerprinted on February 22, 1956, by Lieutenant D.H. Lackey as one of the people indicted as leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott. She was one of 73 people rounded up by deputies that day after a grand jury charged 113 African Americans for organizing the boycott. This was a few months after her arrest on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated municipal bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
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