Two weeks after he finished his dissertation and mailed it back to Boston University, Rosa Parks sat down in a bus. He didn’t know anything about it, he didn’t plan it. But there was a group of women who were teachers at Tuskegee Institute and Alabama State University in Montgomery. It was kind of a progressive women’s club. They had been very upset about the way people were treated on the buses. Several young black women had been jailed, beaten, brutalized on the buses. But they didn’t feel as though they were — they were looking for the right person to start a protest. Well, Rosa Parks was one of the sweetest women in the world. She never raised her voice, everybody in town respected her. When they put her off the bus and took her to jail, they had their candidate. These women went to E.D. Nixon, who was the head of the NAACP, and they said, “Look, if you have the big Baptist minister or the big Methodist minister head this movement, we’re going to have the same old rivalry we’ve always had. Why don’t you try to convince them to let this young man…” — now he was 26 then — “Let this young man lead the movement.”