I originally wrote this back in October of 2005, when the Miami Herald article referenced below was originally published...

Does anybody remember the name J.F. Blake and who he was? Here’s a hint. His name became publicly known - to a degree - on December 1st, 50 years ago.

Give up yet? J.F. Blake is the white bus driver who demanded that Rosa Parks surrender her seat to a white passenger. Here are some interesting facts surrounding her story...

Quoting from an archived (must pay to read) Miami Herald article:

[L]et’s correct another misconception: It’s not precisely true that she refused to give up her seat to a white man. The seats next to her and across the aisle were empty, vacated by black people who had already heeded the bus driver’s command to get up. So there were places for the white man to sit.

But under the segregation statutes of Montgomery, Ala., no white man was expected to suffer the indignity of sitting next to a black woman or even across from her. So driver J.F. Blake asked again. And Rosa Parks, this soft-spoken 42-year-old department store seamstress just trying to get home from work, gave him her answer again. She told him no.

Her feet were not tired. Her soul was exhausted.

It is interesting to me that the names of a white bus driver without a heart, a white male passenger who would not sit next to a black woman, and the zealous white police officer who arrested her have been lost to the public recollection, but the name of one tired black woman who had it up to "here" with that kind of nonsense has gone down in the annals of history.