Making this particular illustration for Rosa Parks, there’s a message that I wanted to communicate with everyone also — that this movement — that the bus boycott could’ve never happened if Emmett Till wasn’t killed the summer before. See, this was boiling under the community’s surface. This was in the minds of all the African-Americans in the South, and this is something that shook the whole community throughout the South. So, we were on edge. And what snapped was when they arrested Rosa, because we had already had enough. We were beyond the boiling point. And this small, so-called insignificant moment became that huge moment because of what had happened to Emmett Till earlier.
We need to understand that to understand what happened with Rosa, because the 15-year-old girl did it before Rosa. A lotta folks had done it before Rosa, but it was this incident that sort of came to a head, and that’s why I put Emmett — “In the Memory of Emmett Till” in the newspaper that was being read on the bus — to sort of expand the text, to give it more context and give it more weight, because it was a weighty situation.
