According to the Library of Congress site, today (Dec. 1st) marks the 53rd anniversary of the Arrest of Rosa Parks because she refused to relinquish her seat on the bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Granted, I have never had to deal with the “back of the bus” issue because of my race, but I have faced a different type of bus issue.
In my sophomore year my stop was the last for the bus in the morning. Needless to say, when there are many junior and senior football players riding the same bus and not enough seats to hold three people (what the school district considered acceptable), I found myself being directed by the driver to “find a seat” even though there wasn’t any or sitting on the edge of a seat holding on for dear life every time we turned a corner so I wouldn’t fall out into the aisle. Then as a senior, I drove to school most of the year until one month when I wasn’t able to drive (due to circumstances I won’t go into here). I had to ride the bus for the first time since the middle of my sophomore year. After three days of riding the bus, the driver basically told me that since I wasn’t “included” on the original bus passenger list, there really was no room so I couldn’t ride any more. Basically I was being kicked off the bus because I’d found other ways to get to school for almost two years.
On this day in history Agon debuted by the New York City Ballet. The composer and choreographer, Igor Stravinsky and George Ballanchine, had fled their homeland of Russia after the Revolution and settled in the U.S. They, like Rosa Parks, dealt with cultural and safety issues and some form of discrimination.
Are there any persons in your family or ancestry who fled their homeland due to discrimination or a difference of political views? What about persons of any race who was told to go to the “back of the bus” (or something like that) for reasons unknown? How did they deal with it?
All My Branches Genealogy 
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