(EDITOR’S NOTE: Montgomery, Alabama, today marks the 65th anniversary of Montgomery Bus Boycott, which many consider the start of the modern Civil Rights movement. On his Facebook page, Veteran TV Journalist Sam Ford of ABC7 and NewsChannel 8 here in Washington, D.C., posted the article below on this historical “milestone” that I hope he does not mind me sharing with readers of BAHAMAS CHRONICLE as a Guest Commentary.)
GUEST COMMENTARY: BY SAM FORD
WASHINGTON, D.C., December 5, 2020 — Today is the 65th anniversary of a milestone, The Montgomery Bus Boycott….and 40 years ago I met the woman who started it all, Rosa Parks.
At the time she worked in the downtown Detroit office of Congressman John Conyers. My TV crew and I followed her as she left her office and got on her bus to go home to her apartment, where we conducted the interview.
I assumed that this “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement” would be a female version of Martin Luther King: articulate, gregarious, extroverted. No, no,no.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “Shy person?”
It was one of the most difficult interviews I have ever done. Mrs Parks might pause two or three seconds between words, let alone sentences! I was stunned. But the information was really interesting.
No, her feet didn’t hurt, as some news reports claimed in 1955. She said she didn’t give up her seat to the white man when the bus driver ordered her to get up because she had a right, under Alabama’s “separate but equal” law, to sit there on the front row of what was considered the Black half of the bus.
She said with a lot of drivers (all white in 1955 Montgomery), the Blacks stood in their half of the bus when it was filled and same for the whites, who stood in their half. But, she said, there were some extremely racist drivers who believed that no white should stand while any Black sat, so when the white half filled, they would say they were declaring black rows white and the Black people had to get up and let the white people sit down.
When the driver ordered Mrs Park’s row for whites, so this white man could sit, Mrs Parks refused. The bus stopped while the police were called and Mrs Parks was arrested.
You’ve probably seen the famous picture where the young cop is fingerprinting Mrs Parks. She said he was so nervous that she started helping him to get it done. She was 42 at the time, a seamstress at one of the department stores in Montgomery, married to Raymond Parks, who had died about three years before our interview in Detroit, where they had relocated many years earlier.
And there’s something else she told me about that bus incident, which may have been the main reason she refused to give to her seat. She couldn’t stand James Blake, the bus driver.
She said while with most drivers you would walk in the front of the bus, drop the coins in the slot to pay the fare and go sit down in the back….NOT WITH THIS GUY. You had to pay up front, exit the bus and then walk in the back door to sit down.
She said 12 years earlier, she had got on and walked to the back to sit down and he told her to get off and come in the back. When she walked back out the front to do what he told her, he closed the door and drove off and left her. Mrs Parks had disliked that man for 12 years and that day in December 1955 she just had enough of his B.S. and said “No!”
Sometimes things happen because of great principles, and sometimes, really, it’s just personal.
But after word spread through the Montgomery community that Rosa Parks — who was secretary for the local NAACP, faithful member of the AME Church — had been treated like that, the community rallied round, and the Civil Rights Movement was born.
After I finished that interview, tortuous though it was, I realized even more that I was standing in the presence of greatness! I wanted to be around her more. And I did something that I have never done before or since, I asked an interviewee would she please have dinner with me.
It seems Mrs Parks liked me, too. Can I bring my nephew? She asked. Of course, I said.
They picked a place called Mr Mikes and they and my TV crew and Ed Love Jr, my cousin in Detroit and I, all had a wonderful evening talking about the Civil Rights days and our experiences in Alabama. Mrs Parks most reminds you of a favorite aunt. That was one of the great moments of my career.
And years later, I learned that Mrs Parks was in the building at ABC7 here in Washington to do an interview. I rushed over to say hello, and before long we were laughing and she was repeating to me a story I had told her during that dinner about meeting the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.
When she died, the NAACP flew her body all over the country, including here to Washington, where her casket was on display in the Rotunda of the US Capitol.
I covered the arrival of her casket at Metropolitan AME Church in downtown DC, when a man yelled something that we were all soon yelling too: THANK YOU, ROSA,THANK YOU!
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Television news reporter Sam Ford was born on May 29, 1953 in Coffeyville, Kansas, to construction worker Sammie Ford and laundry worker Kathleen Owens. In 1974, Ford graduated with his B.S. degree in journalism from the University of Kansas. While at the university, he began his career in media with a job as a disc jockey at the college and local radio station. Ford’s career soon made the transition into news journalism, and, in 1974, Ford was hired as a reporter/announcer on both KSJN Radio (a Minnesota Public Radio station) and KMSP-TV (an ABC affiliate television channel). He then studied journalism at the graduate level at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and worked as a reporter at WCCO-TV, where he wrote and produced the first of many African American history TV features of his career. In 1975, Ford was one of the forty-four founding members of the National Association of Black Journalists in Washington, D.C. He spent nine years as a reporter for CBS News, before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1987 to work for ABC News.)
