Alabama Remembers Black Soldier's Defiance

[Judi Lynn]

Alabama Remembers Black Soldier's Defiance

By AMANDA THOMAS
Associated Press Writer

January 16, 2006, 6:12 AM EST


MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- Five years before Rosa Parks launched a bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat to a white man, a uniformed black soldier balked at an order to board a bus through a back door and paid with his life.

Yet the 1950 police shooting of Pfc. Thomas Edwards Brooks had largely been lost to history until it was brought up again during the events marking the 50th anniversary of the boycott and in a new book about the historic protest.

Now the case is getting the kind of attention boycott veterans say is long overdue.

"A lot of this stuff that went on on the buses will never really be known except among the black people who quite often felt there was nothing that could be done," said Nick LaTour, son of boycott organizer E.D. Nixon. "This is the kind of thing that had gone on through the years that led up to the people saying, 'This was enough.'"
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http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-bus-boycott-killing,0,6382829.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines