Rosa Parks first incident on segregated bus

For years, the black community had complained that the situation was unfair, and Parks was no exception: "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest...I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."[citation needed] Parks had her first run-in on the public bus on a rainy day in 1943, when the bus driver, James F. Blake, demanded that she get off the bus and reenter through the back door. As she began to exit by the front door, she dropped her purse. Parks sat down for a moment in a seat for white passengers to pick up her purse. The bus driver was enraged and barely let her step off the bus before speeding off. Rosa walked more than five miles (8 km) home in the rain.

It was a rainy day in 1943. Rosa was waiting at a gloomy, dark bus stop, waiting for a bus to get home in. After a while the bus pulled up to the curb and the doors screeched open and Rosa saw a mean red faced white bus driver glaring down at her. She walked up the steps and paid her 10-cent fee. Instead of walking off the bus and getting on through the back doors she just walked straight through the white section and sat down in a black section seat. The bus driver stood up and marched over to her. He then demanded that she got off the bus, walk to the back doors and then get on. Rosa refused and after much quarrelling, she finally got off the bus and walked home in the pouring rain.

Many in the black community, especially Rosa Parks, had complained for many years that this situation, along with other segregation issues, was wrong. Parks had her first of many confrontations with the bus drivers in 1943 when, because it was raining, she boarded the bus through the front door. The bus driver forced her to depart the bus and reenter through the rear door. As she was leaving the bus through the front door, she dropped her purse. She bent down to pick it up and, in the process, half sat in a seat reserved only for white folk. By this time, the driver was in a fit of rage and Rosa barely made it off of the bus before the driver took off up the road. Rosa was left to walk, in the rain, five miles home from where the bus dropped her off.