Before Rosa

Seventeen months before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on an Alabama bus in 1955, a little-known Civil Rights heroine named Sara Mae Flemming refused to obey a similar ordinance on a bus in Columbia, S.C. Flemming‘s story has largely faded from the public‘s memory. “Before Rosa” tells of Flemming‘s experience with an angry bus driver and her struggle to get her lawsuit against the bus company to court. Eventually, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that segregated seating in Flemming‘s case was unconstitutional. The ruling became a precedent that played an important role later in the Parks case. Filmmaker Steve Crump is a news reporter in Charlotte, NC and produces black history documentaries as an independent producer for WTVI-TV, the PBS affiliate in Charlotte.