Where It All Goes Down
In "Incident," our older, African-American speaker remembers a haunting moment from his youth in which he experienced racism firsthand. And where does it all go down? The bus.
Now, racism and busses: is it possible these two subjects are making you wonder about Rosa Parks? Do you think the poem references her in some way? Sorry Shmoopsters, if you're thinking this, you're wrong; Rosa Parks staged her famous act of civil disobedience on a bus in 1955, 30 years after the publication of "Incident."
So the poem isn't referencing Rosa Parks, but it doesn't matter, because the setting of the bus is still potent. In the highly segregated cities, like the Baltimore of the 1920s, public transportation was one place in which people of different racial backgrounds were forced to come in contact with each other. (And there weren't necessarily a lot of places like this.) While it sounds like the perfect venue for different races to come together in harmony, that's sadly wishful thinking. The bus can be a site of racial conflict, as we see in the poem, and it often was. Just remember what happened to Rosa in 1955.