“My time had come”

continued

Jack, and have seen each other often since the Lousmas returned to Ann Arbor (they now live in Scio Township).

It was at their urging that King first wrote about her experience in the segregated South as the daughter of a sharecropper. “Daddy and the others workers picked cotton,” King writes, “while I picked the rocks so that the horses wouldn’t hurt their hooves when they pulled up the wagons that collected the harvest.” At church on Sundays, “Our tired bones sat on those hard seats as if they were wax on a hot day, but hearing the word of the Lord and songs of His goodness made our hearts dance, too . . .”

In the 1950s, with the names of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks on everyone’s lips, King wanted to find her own way to make a difference--to be “counted among the faithful, not just the outwardly brave.” Her moment came unexpectedly, on a bus trip back to North Carolina to visit her sister.

All the seats were filled when a blind white man got on. He banged his thick cane as he shuffled down the aisle. The white passengers at the front of the bus, King recalls, looked away from him as if he could see them. None offered him a seat.