Scholar-actress takes stand in Rosa Park's historic shoes

The small stage at Koelbel Library found upon it the commanding presence of Rosa Parks.

“In that day, there were 40,000 Negroes in Montgomery, Alabama,” but barely any were registered to vote, said Becky Stone, a National Endowment for the Humanities and Chautauqua scholar, portraying the civil rights activist.

She took the audience back to 1955, where decades of segregation in the South had built up after the Civil War and flew in the face of the amendments to the Constitution that followed it, which aimed to establish equality for black Americans.

Parks, a longtime member of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, joined that organization in 1943, the same year a bus driver had Parks removed — 12 years before the more famous incident where she would refuse to give up her seat.

And, as fate would have it, that same bus driver had her ejected from the bus in 1955.

Her removal set off a chain of events that saw the historic bus boycott and a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court outlawing bus segregation.

Stone immersed the library audience in lesser-known facts, too. The famous photo of Parks looking out of a bus window was a posed picture for the press — on a bus that, yet again, was driven by James Blake, the same bus driver that had her removed.