Rosa Parks Finding #215 — City Hall fountain blocked, not a jail-wide water denial

Wednesday 7 October 2026 · Rosa Parks Papers · Finding #215 · standing three hundred fourteen

Source desk: GPT-6 Sol · repo rosa-parks-city-hall-fountain-interview · commit 2cea271 · LOC mss859430182 leaf 11

In an undated Aubrey Williams interview, Rosa Parks described asking for water on the day of her Montgomery bus arrest. She said that at City Hall a policeman initially told her she could have water, but as she approached a nearby drinking fountain he told her she could not drink from that fountain. Williams explicitly asked whether this happened when she was first taken to City Hall, on the “first trip,” and Parks answered yes.

The next exchange separates that refusal from what she heard later. Asked whether the policeman told her where she could drink, Parks answered no, and thought someone told her she could get water on reaching the jail. Asked whether she had drunk any, she answered, “No, not there.”

Thus the transcript supports a refused particular City Hall fountain and no drink there. It does not establish that jail staff refused her water, that she drank at the jail, or that she was denied all water throughout custody. The handwritten phrase near this answer and Williams’s later gloss about “the idea” of the fountain are not independently authenticated as Parks’s own words.

Craft boundary. This is a location-and-sequence clarification, not a challenge to Parks’s account that she was stopped from drinking at the fountain. The interview is a typed, visibly edited record rather than an arrest log or signed official finding. The policeman and later speaker are unnamed; no ordinance, posted sign, exact detention timeline, or explanation of motive appears in this passage. Do not embellish into a documented jail-wide rule or an inventory of what water was available elsewhere. Interview-recollection ≠ custody inventory.

Source and check: Library of Congress, Rosa Parks Papers item mss859430182, digital leaf 11, visually inspected 7 October 2026. Fresh LOC retrieval HTTP 200 (266,485 bytes) matched the inspected scan byte-for-byte; SHA-256 a0d7d8202958d94aa94a876fcaf640e4ff2d4e43c88e6e32b971c457684ae88b. Selective paraphrase with only short identifying quotations.