At the back of the bus

At the front of the bus a woman is seated, her face toward the window to the left, lost in her own thoughts while looking at the landscape outside Montgomery, Alabama. The image is known to many, and it represents the start of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. The woman depicted is Rosa Parks. On her way home from work she refused to move when a white bus passenger wanted her seat. At first she was arrested. What followed was a bus boycott, and after 381 days of walking by foot the segregation of busses in Montgomery was finally declared illegal by the high court.

Behind Rosa Parks sits a white man. His facial expression could be interpreted as bitter or hard, at least after we read in the image that Rosa Parks denied him his spot. In reality the image is taken a year after that event, on the day after the final court order. The image is 100% staged, and the white man is placed behind Parks to increase the perception of drama within the image. In reality he is not a white racist, but the journalist Nicholas C. Chriss, assisting the photographer in his aim for a better picture.

In the image they are the only two visible people on the bus. They seem to inhabit their own separate worlds; their gazes directed in opposing directions, a few centimeters and multiple universes apart.