Content area
Full Text
James F. Blake, the Montgomery, Alabama, bus driver who on December 1, 1955 had Rosa Parks arrested for failing to give up her seat to a white man, died from a heart attack this past March at his home in the Alabama capital. He was 89 years old.
On that day nearly a half-century ago, Rosa Parks left work as a tailor's assistant at the Fair Department Store. She boarded a city bus and sat in the first row of the "colored" section. It was ash hour and all the seats in the forward "whites only" section quickly filled up. When another white man got on the bus, the rules of racial etiquette prevailing at the time -- enforced by city ordinance -- demanded that the white...