A ride to remember in a bus, in Montgomery, Alabama

MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA: I take route No. 1 from Zelda Road to downtown Montgomery, the city where a black seamstress had, in 1955, refused to give up her seat in the front section of a bus to a white man and move to the back, where the coloured folk were supposed to sit. I sit in the front.

Our driver is a black woman, Miss Pat, who tells me the story: ���She was just so tired and fed up that when that driver told her to get up she just wouldn���t.��� The rest is fairly well-known: Rosa Parks was arrested; the black population of the town boycotted the buses and the civil rights movement was born. But there are a couple of myths that have been hard to dispel. One: that she was an old lady (she was 42); the other is that the action was totally spontaneous (she was just tired that day). Parks had been an active member of the National Association for Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and plans for a protest were at least a few months in
the making.

Also, what hastened a compromise was the fact that the boycott was costing the city bus service $3,000 a day. Blacks had to stand or sit in the back of the bus, but they paid the same fare. There was no better metaphor for segregation than this: you gave the same, but you received less. After paying a dollar, I roll along in Miss Pat���s bus, to where Rosa Parks had hopped on in 1955 ��� a terrific museum in her honour has been built there ��� and to Court Square, now a WiFi hotspot; in the mid-1800s it was a thriving slave market.(Incidentally, the slave trade was so entrenched because it was very lucrative: in the 1860s, slaves cost between $1,500 and $3,000 ��� a hell of a lot of money. This also explains why the southern states fought so hard over the right to keep slaves.)

I take all of this in at a time when America is asking the question: ���Are we ready for a black president?��� And the McCain campaign, primarily through a single brain-celled organism called Sarah Palin, is saying it isn't. (���He is Barack Hussein Obama; an Arab; a terrorist; who is he?��� and so on.)I meet Coleman Smith, the tough security officer at the Montgomery Area Transit System bus terminus. He says he's been following this election more closely than any of the others he���s seen in his 63 years. Why is that? ���Because of Obama, I guess.��� ���What's special about him?��� ���He's black.���Forget the presidency, it is easy enough to overlook the fact that blacks got the unfettered right to vote ��� they were kept out by devices such as a literacy test ��� in the world���s greatest democracy less than 50 years ago, in 1965. They have voted ���freely��� in only in the last 11 of the country's 56 elections so far.

But standing in Montgomery, which was pivotal in winning that right, I wasn't about to let Mr Smith go. I tell him about this black guy, who (literally) begged McCain to take the country over at a public meeting. ���Is one o'them Uncle Toms,��� he says. ���Like in Uncle Tom's Cabin, when the white man say 'I'm sick', the black man say 'we sick'. Know what um saying. That's when the white man ask the black man to lay on his feet. And then, when the white man say 'I'm feelin' better', the black man say 'we feelin' better'. Brainwashed, man...���He makes a point right afterwards: it isn't the white man who keeps the black man down, its other black men. There is a recurring theme no matter where you travel in the United States.

When it is time for me to leave, I realise I can't make the Greyhound bus that I'm supposed to be on because the city bus won't get me there. I take the problem to the information desk. There, Mr Smith and the clerk conspire to arrange an unscheduled bus, to take a solitary passenger, me, to the Greyhound station.The bus isn't anything like the one Rosa Parks rode: it's more like van, seating just about a dozen people and it doesn't have the mid-section door, which served as the racial boundary. Benny Jackson, the driver, was 14 during the boycott and had been in those buses. ���But we did a lot of walkin'... a laawt of walkin,��� he says of the time. Many people ���had no money to afford no ride��� in the car pools that were organised by the black community so that people got to work. The walking got them further than most had imagined, though.

As we drive, I can't help wondering what the odds would have been for such a special ride for a person of colour (like myself) in Montgomery, circa 1955. Or, for that matter, what they are in Wasilla, Alaska in 2008.