Wilson’s Art Deco bus station stood from 1938 to the mid-1990s.
In 1943, a dozen years before Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks’ celebrated acts of resistance, at least four young African-American men and women refused to move to the back of Wilson buses. Read again of their direct challenges to Jim Crow and discrimination and lift up their memory.
News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), 7 April 1943.
Raleigh’s major newspaper followed up on the sentence levied on James Parker, who refused to move to the back of a Wilson bus twelve years before Rosa Parks. All things considered, Parker’s punishment was surprisingly light — perhaps, none yet perceived a real threat to the Jim Crow system.
Wilson Daily Times, 6 April 1943.
Meet James Parker, American hero.
In April 1943, Parker boarded a Wilson city bus on Saturday evening. He sat down in the white section and remained firmly ensconced when the driver asked him to move. The driver, James Batchelor, abandoned his route to drive the bus to the police station, where Parker was arrested and charged with violating North Carolina’s “passenger law,” which allowed for the designation of colored and white sections in commercial transport vehicles. Parker was adjudged guilty and given a thirty-day suspended sentence provided he remain “in good behavior.” Per the Daily Times, Parker was the first person to challenge Jim Crow laws in Wilson County in 25 years.
Clipping courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III.