On This Day In 1955...(Remember to Remember)
drewnice
5,465 Posts
"Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Blacks were also required to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system (formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.) and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation."Rosa Parks:[/b] "Why do you push us around?"Officer:[/b] "I don't know but the law is the law and you're under arrest." 
A PRISONER:
Mother of the Civil Rights MovementIN THE "LAND OF THE FREE..."
Remember to Remember
Comments
BTW - I don't necessarily have an expectation that people will respond to this thread. It's just something I want to put on your mind today, especially considering what we've witnessed regarding the state of race relations in America over the past week or so.
"Rosa Parks: The Story Behind her Sitting Down."
My favorite image of Rosa Parks, who died Monday at the age of 92, is of the confrontation between her and a policeman on that auspicious afternoon of Dec. 1, 1955, when she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. After the officer had instructed her to "make it light on yourself" and give up her seat to a standing white man, she later said, she asked him, "Why do you push us around?" And he had given an honest answer: "I don't know." But then he explained that he had to arrest her anyway (even though she was not in technical violation of the city's segregation laws, but that's a whole other tangent of this rich saga). And so did history turn. In support of Parks' defiance, the black citizens of Montgomery boycotted the city buses until segregated seating was abolished, one whole year later. And so was born what is still known as the modern civil rights movement.
What's so great about that exchange between Parks and the policeman is the way they both seem to helicopter momentarily above the affray and acknowledge a truth of history: We all act upon, and are acted upon by, forces we don't understand. And then suddenly those forces crystallize in an event or person that "de-randomizes" all that has come before. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., who as a green young minister reluctantly agreed to head the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks "had been tracked down by the zeitgeist???the spirit of the time."
Truly,
Great thread.
Young Jeezy Thread= 2 Pages
This Thread = 6 Replies
thanks for posting this
respect due....i learned, in the course of taking a labor history class this semester, that many of the struggles of the 50s/ civil rights era actually began in the 20s and more so in the 30s with the rise of the radical labor movement...black communists in Birmingham in the 30s, strikes in Memphis at Firestone plant,...there were def other cases of defiance in the South prior to Ms Parks more celebrated case...hers ignited a movement and deserves all due recognition...peace