A few months before Rosa Parks made her stand, a fifteen-year-old black girl had refused to give up her seat to a white and had been dragged from the bus (“She insisted she was colored and just as good as white,” T. J. Ward, the arresting policeman, had noted with some surprise during the local court proceedings on her arrest). She had been charged with assault and battery for resisting arrest. For a time the black leadership thought of making hers the constitutional test case it sought, but backed off when someone learned that she was pregnant.
