Beyond the Bus

Although she's had racist slurs shouted at her in front of her young daughter, most of the racism Tamara Newman encounters "is so covert and hidden."

"It'll eat away at you," says the 31-year-old senior project manager for Sprint-Nextel.

Time and again, Newman says, she has been out to dinner with a couple of her sisters or a few black female friends, only to have a pleasant evening end bitterly when the bill comes with the gratuity already added. She makes a point of summoning the manager when it happens. "Do you think I'm incapable of calculating 20 percent or perhaps more for excellent service?" she will ask.

Like Rosa Parks, she's tired of it, and tired of being tired.

"I was having a conversation with a friend and just saying we need another Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks," Newman says.

Shirley Smith, a 55-year-old junior high teacher in Temple Hills, wonders what ordinary man or woman today would muster the strength to renew the fight for dignity that Parks inspired.

"She was willing to go to jail for the cause. Really, honestly, how many of us are willing to go to jail to make a statement these days?" she asks.

In the line, 47-year-old Donna Horton struggles to explain to her 8-year-old daughter, Mary, why Parks was arrested.

"Because her bus seat was reserved for white people," Horton says as they leave the Rotunda.

"But why?" the little girl wants to know.

"Because. They didn't want people like us in those seats."

"But why?"

Frustration gives way to revelation, and in the flood of tears she was choking back the whole time she circled Parks's closed casket, Horton finds hope. "Isn't it wonderful that she can't imagine this?" she says. "Isn't it wonderful she'll never live through this? That she can't even understand it happening?"

Staff writer Debbi Wilgoren contributed to this report.