AP Success - AP US History: Rosa Parks on Montgomery, Alabama

In my lifetime, I have known Negroes who were killed by whites without any arrests or investigations and with little or no publicity. It is the custom to keep such things covered up in order not to disturb what is called [letter left incomplete.]…
I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment [her refusal to surrender her seat on a Montgomery City Bus] that I couldn’t take it anymore. When I asked the policeman why we had to be pushed around? He said he didn’t know. “The law is the law. You are under arrest.” I didn’t resist...
I want to feel the nearness of something secure. It is such a lonely feeling that I am cut off from life. I am nothing, I belong nowhere and to no one.
There is just so much hurt, disappointment and oppression one can take. The bubble of life grows larger. The line between reason and madness grows thinner. The reopening of old wounds are unthinkably painful. Time begins the healing process of wounds cut deeply by oppression. We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restrictions of Jim Crow laws.
Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he had done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world.
He walks us on a tightrope from birth to the end of life’s span, whether it be long or of brief duration. Little children are so conditioned early to learn their places in the segregated pattern as they take their first toddling steps and are weaned from their mother’s breast.