'She Made It Clear That One Person Could Make a Difference'

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Patricia Gassaway, 46, and her niece, Shante, waited for the No. 80 bus yesterday afternoon on North Capitol Street. Shante, a shy 12-year-old, draped herself over a bright yellow newspaper box and rolled her eyes as her aunt gave her a history lesson on Parks.

"She did something for us so we wouldn't have to sit on the back of the bus," Gassaway said. "If we choose to sit in the front, that's fine."

When the bus arrived, Gassaway and Shante headed to the back, but not the very back. The front was labeled "priority seating" for senior citizens and the disabled.

Behind the Gassaways, sitting in the second row from the back, was Tyrone Venable, a former history teacher who manages an immigration law firm in Tysons Corner.

"I'm going to see her body tonight," he said.

He recalled how he always included Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in the curriculum for fifth- and sixth-graders. "From slavery to the Martin Luther King marches to the present history, I was trying to get them to understand," he said.

Elnora Anderson, 80, who sat in the middle of the bus, grew up in a family of 12 children in Tappahannock, Va. As farmers, "we had a buggy and a wagon," she said. "But the buggy couldn't make it to Richmond. . . . Boy, you got on that bus."

And that's when she encountered racism, she said.

"I didn't have the nerve to move," said the great-great-grandmother. "You had to sit back or get up and stand. It was cruel, you know."

Today, she's grateful for people like Parks who have made her older years on the bus a much more comfortable ride. "That shows that sometimes you have to stand up for your rights. We ride the bus. I sit in the back. I sit here. I sit everywhere. Oh, I'm just riding, honey," she said.

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