Booker T. Jones was asked by CBS to write about his experience in the Civil Rights era. Jones recounts a life in which the letter of law of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was constantly under attack and in need of presidential involvement even after it passed. He writes of Rosa Parks and what she meant to so many.

I imagine my very own mother suffered identical belittlement as she worked as a domestic on Memphis' affluent Park Avenue, taking the bus from Walker Avenue in the mid-1920s. She passed her positions down to my sister, Gwen, who was a maid at the Park Hotel in the 1940s near the time of my birth.

Read the full essay here.