“When I was fourteen, I [won] an oratorical contest . . . my subject was ‘The Negro and the Constitution.’ [On the bus home] the white driver ordered us to get up and give the whites our seats. We didn’t move quickly enough to suit him, so he began cursing us, calling us, ‘black sons of bitches.’ I intended to stay right in that seat, but [my teacher] finally urged me up, saying we had to obey the law. And so we stood up in the aisle for the ninety miles [from Dublin, Georgia,] to Atlanta. That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”
