“Treading the tight-rope of Jim Crow from birth to death, from almost our first knowledge of life to our last conscious thought … is a major mental acrobatic feat,” wrote Rosa Parks, then an NAACP secretary and a seamstress in Montgomery, in a notebook she kept in the 1950s. “It takes a noble soul to plumb this line. There is always a line of some kind—color line, hanging rope, tight rope. To me, it seems that we are puppets on string in the white man’s hands … and we perform to their satisfaction or suffer the consequence if we get out of line.”
