ROANOKE, Va. -- A decade before Rosa Parks took her stand against the injustice and indignity of segregation, Roanoke's Margie Jumper took hers.

Jumper's public act of defiance wasn't on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus but on a streetcar near downtown Roanoke. Like Parks, Jumper would not give up her seat to a white man.

"I refused to get up," Jumper, now 91, said this week of the incident, which happened nearly 60 years ago. "I felt like I had the right to sit anywhere anyone else did."

Parks' death this week has given the nation reason to reflect on the achievements of a civil rights matriarch who demonstrated courage in the face of injustice. Parks' refusal to give up her seat on a bus in December 1955 set off a chain reaction that changed a legal system of oppression and forced the nation to apply its founding principles to not just some but all of its citizens.

For her steely resolve, Parks became famous, revered as "the mother of the modern civil rights movement." But countless others -- black and white -- also undertook quiet and purposeful acts that demonstrated their resilience in a system that could segregate them but could not break their human spirit.

Margie Jumper was one of them.

Tuesday evening, dressed in slacks and a blazer and sitting in the common area of the Roanoke County nursing home where she lives, Jumper said she never met Parks but believes they shared a common determination.

"Ain't no need of letting folks do you wrong," said Jumper, a small, bespectacled widow and retired domestic worker.

Jumper, who was born in Martinsville and moved to Roanoke as a young woman, distinctively remembers the Sunday afternoon about 1946 when she climbed aboard a streetcar in Raleigh Court. Normally, she worked for a family Monday through Friday but had picked up some extra hours that weekend.

Jumper and her husband Clarence, a cook for Norfolk and Western Railroad, had no car, so the streetcar was her normal mode of transportation. A city ordinance stated that black and white passengers could not sit together, and whites sat in the front.

As part of Jumper's usual routine, she had ridden the streetcar that Sunday morning to work. When it was time to go home, she climbed aboard. The streetcar was fairly full, so "I took the first seat I saw," she said. "They had those big long seats in the back. That's where they wanted us."

The vacant seat she had occupied was at about the middle of the streetcar. She recalled she had been riding about 10 minutes when a white man got on. The man asked the conductor to make her get up.

She refused.  "It wasn't right, and I had the right to sit there," Jumper said, reasserting her defiance all these years later.

When I asked her what exactly she said to the conductor, Jumper replied, "I done forgot what I said. I just knew I wouldn't get up."

At that, the motorman tapped a bell and the police came. Jumper wouldn't tell them who she was or provide any information, and they arrested her.

She was charged with violating the city ordinance. When she got to the station, Jumper said, she recognized a lawyer, who called her husband. Jumper pleaded guilty, paid a small fine and the incident was largely forgotten.

But in 2003, the Roanoke chapter of the NAACP remembered Jumper by honoring her with the Rev. R.R. Wilkinson Memorial Award for Social Justice.

Jumper's caregiver, Teresa Brandon of Roanoke, said the elderly woman's defiance all those years ago on the streetcar is part of her character.  "She's very strong, very determined," said Brandon, who has known Jumper since 1976 when they became neighbors. "Only thing I know is she demands respect."

As I sat in the nursing center with Jumper, she remembered when she heard the news 50 years ago that Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat.

In a lighthearted moment, Jumper said, chuckling, "Maybe she heard about me."

Then she paused and became serious. "You have to do what you know is right."

Printed in the Lynchburg, VA News & Advance on October 28, 2005