Lucille Times, Who Inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dies at 100
Source: NY Times
Six months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, Mrs. Times had an altercation with a bus driver and stopped riding the city’s segregated buses.
By Clay Risen
Lucille Times, whose encounter with a bus driver in Montgomery, Ala., in June 1955 led her to begin a one-woman boycott of the city’s public transportation, an act of defiance that inspired a mass boycott six months later after another Black woman, Rosa Parks, was charged with defying the same bus driver, died on Aug. 16 at the home of her nephew Daniel Nichols. She was 100.
Mr. Nichols, with whom she had been living for several years, said the cause was complications of Covid-19.
Mrs. Times was driving to the dry cleaners on June 15, 1955, when she got into an altercation with James Blake, the bus driver, who tried to push her car off the road three times. She continued on her errand, but he followed her.
Parking his bus across the street, he ran over to her and yelled, “You Black son of a bitch!” she recalled in a 2017 interview.
Lucille Times in 2005. “She was like an iron fist in a velvet glove,” a former Alabama attorney general said. “She didn’t get pushed around.”Credit...Rainier Ehrhardt/Special to the Montgomery Advertiser, via USA TODAY NETWORK
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And she made it this long only to get COVID-19. 
Glad that the article included this (which I knew) -
And they later make note about Rosa Parks, who I knew was not just an "activist", but was secretary of that chapter (the article didn't mention her actual position).
It was this (and similar) incidents that June 1955, along with Emmett Till's lynching that August 1955, that spurred Parks' planned defiance in December 1955.
I am glad she was able to finally see some positive changes during the remainder of her life since her decision to get involved - including some venerated symbols of hate like the flags and fucking statues of Confederate traitors removed, the franchise gained (although they are actively trying to take that away), a first black President and First Lady, along with a first black Vice President.
We know the hearts and souls of some Americans will always be evil but we have to keep moving forward.
Rest in peace dear lady.
