The Gift on the Bus
    
At school I asked my friend Cory, “Want to go get a drink?”
    
“Sure,” said Cory. We asked our teacher if we could get a drink, and she said that we could. While I was getting a drink, I imagined not being able to get a drink with Cory because he is black.
    
There used to be laws that said that blacks couldn’t drink at the same drinking fountains as whites, and on city buses they had to sit in the back of the bus. They even had to give up their seats to white people if the bus was too crowded. I feel lucky that there aren’t laws like that anymore. I couldn’t imagine being alive a long, long time ago, because the laws were unfair.
    
A very brave person called Rosa Parks helped change the unfair segregation laws. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to get up from her bus seat for a white person just because her skin was black. She said to the bus driver, “I don’t think I should have to stand up.” So the bus driver called the police, and she was arrested.
    
Rosa Parks’s token of love to the world was that she helped change the segregation laws that said that it was OK to separate people by the color of their skin.
    
Now, I was done getting my drink with Cory and I thought about how Rosa Parks’s token of love changed the United Stated of America.