Assignment 1 for Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.

AJ07001: Introduction to American Studies I 31st January, 2011

When oppressed people willingly accept their oppression they only serve to give the oppressor a convenient justification for his acts. Martin Luther King Jr.

The One Event from the Period of the 1950s and 1960s I feel is the Most Critical This paper describes the importance and ramifications of the Rosa Louise McCauley Parkss brave act of civil disobedience, namely her refusal to surrender her seat to a white passenger on the 1st of December 1955, which I feel is the most critical event from the period of the 1950s and 1960s. Truly it would be foolish to assume that any most critical event actually exists. Donnes famous words No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main (Donne, pp. 108) can be successfully re-applied from human beings to historical events, as there is in fact hardly a single event in the history of humankind not resulting from a number of antecedent events and (figuratively speaking) not giving birth to a number of events consequential. The reason perhaps is that every such event of great and small import alike requires at least an individual to happen. An individual brave, desperate or unlucky enough to act. And the rest is... history.

Forlorn hope Before I start arguing why Rosa Parkss act may be seen as the most critical event of the 1950s and 1960s, it is useful to mention some of the foregoing historical events and outline the sociopolitical situation: As the American Civil War and consequently Restoration period ended, the white society in the South sought for means to suppress the freed blacks; most of the Southern states

prepared and successfully passed legislation known as Jim Crow laws segregating the white and black people in housing, acquiring education, and in the use of public or private facilities such as restaurants, trains, and restrooms, and bills preventing blacks from voting, moving freely, and marrying whites. The federal government initially tried to ban the Jim Crow laws with the 14th Amendment, yet the U.S. Supreme Court failed to protect the rights of the black people; it even ruled in the 1883 series of the Civil Rights Cases (Justia.com) that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (George Mason University) was unconstitutional. The blacks were compelled to start fighting the segregation and racial discrimination with a different means: civil disobedience.

Resistance to Civil Government One of the most famous planned acts of civil disobedience antecedent to Rosa Parks act is Homer Plessys refusal to leave the whites car of the East Louisiana Railroad and move to coloreds car in 1892. Since Plessy was classified as black under the 1890 Louisiana Separate Car Act (Hasian Jr., p. 12) despite being seven-eights white he was arrested and jailed. In his case Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana (FindLaw.com, Plessy v. Ferguson) Plessy argued that the Louisiana Separate Car Act denied him his rights under the 13th and 14th Amendments of the United States Constitution. The Committee of Citizens, which defended Plessy, appealed to the United States Supreme Court in 1896, but they lost the case. The Supreme Courts decision established that federal law protected racial segregation mandated by state laws as long as facilities were separate but equal. It took over half a century to overturn the Plessy v. Ferguson decision until the landmark decision in the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (FindLaw.com) which

endorsed that the separate but equal doctrine adopted in Plessy v. Ferguson has no place in the field of public education (Justia).

Rosa Parks: The right woman in the right place It is obvious that the situation in the legislature had changed notably since the break of the 20th century, allowing for procurement of deeper and more abrupt changes in the political and social position of the blacks. Also, as the world-situation in the post-WWII years changed and following the rise of the white-collar society, the scissors among large numbers of relatively well-off whites and the poor blacks started to open wider and wider rapidly, promising social and economic tension growth in the near future of the 1960s.
On December 1, 1955, an attractive Negro seamstress, Mrs. Rosa Parks, boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus in downtown Montgomery. She was returning home after her regular days work in the Montgomery Fair, a leading department store. Tired from long hours on her feet, Mrs. Parks sat down in the first seat behind the section reserved for whites. Not long after she took her seat, the bus operator ordered her, along with three other Negro passengers, to move back in order to accommodate boarding white passengers. By this time every seat in the bus was taken. This meant that if Mrs. Parks followed the drivers command she would have to stand while a white male passenger, who had just boarded the bus, would sit. The other three Negro passengers immediately complied with the drivers request. But Mrs. Parks quietly refused. The result was her arrest. (Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom, pp. 30)

Although Dr. King Jr. stated in his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story that Mrs. Parks was not planted there by the NAACP, or any other organization; she was planted there by her personal sense of dignity and self-respect (King, pp. 31), she was not the first black female in Montgomery on whose case of civil disobedience the black activists started to build a legal case. On March 2, 1955, nine months before Parks, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to surrender her seat to a white man, for which she was arrested. However, according to the author of Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice, Phillip Hoose (Jet, pp. 13), the Montgomery's

black leaders soon found Ms. Colvin unsuitable to become the symbol for the desired legal battle she was pregnant by a married man. Mary Louise Smith, also arrested for refusing to give up her seat before Mrs. Parkss act, proved another unsuitable candidate as her father was rumoured to have an alcohol problem. In either case of being or not being planted on the bus by the NAACP, the arrest of Rosa Parks was an ideal opportunity for the Montgomery's black leaders including Dr. King Jr. to act. The consequential Montgomery bus boycott proved encouragingly successful: With the help of fifty Montgomerys African-American leaders, 7,000 leaflets informing about the boycott and dropped off at black schools and businesses, the support of the black taxi drivers offering reduced fares and initially 17,000 participating blacks (growing up to estimated 42,000 participants in the end) the boycott was ended after 381 days securing the blacks a major victory of the Supreme Court upholding the federal district court decision that the districts segregation laws for public transport buses were unconstitutional (Hare). In my opinion this at first not uncommon situation served as the proverbial spark setting an unquenchable fire of successive events starting with the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott followed by Freedom Rides with almost 450 black and white (!) riders, the successful 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedys petition to the Interstate Commerce Commission, a more than 250,000-participant march on Washington, D.C., in 1963 (Lloyd, et al., pp. 1), resulting in the Civil Rights Act, 1964 (United States Department of Justice) and the Voting Rights Act, 1965 (United States Department of Justice) and eventually leading to the emergence of the Black Power Movement. The body of Rosa Parks (February 4, 1913 October 24, 2005) rests today in the company of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy at the Rotunda in Washington (Dvorak). She was only the second African-American and the first woman to be honoured so.

List of sources: "Our Documents - Civil Rights Act (1964)". United States Department of Justice. Retrieved 2011-01-26. <http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=old&doc=97> "United States Department of Justice - Voting Rights Act of 1965". U.S. Department of Justice. 2006-03-20. Retrieved 2011-01-26. <http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/voting/misc/faq.htm> Civil Rights Act of 1875. Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Retrieved 2011-01-26. <http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/122/recon/civilrightsact.html> Donne, John, Devotions upon emergent occasions, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, Ambassador Books, Ltd., Toronto, Canada, 1959. <http://txtr.com/#text/aav6r9> Dvorak, Petula; Harris, Hamil R. "Washington Prepares To Pay Rosa Parks Rare Tribute at Capitol", The Washington Post. October 29, 2005. Retrieved 2011-01-26. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102801029.html> FindLaw.com, Brown v. Board of Education. Retrieved 2011-01-26. <http://laws.findlaw.com/us/347/483.html> FindLaw.com, Plessy v. Ferguson. Retrieved 2011-01-26. <http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=163&invol=537> Hare, Ken, "Overview", Montgomery Advetiser. Retrieved 2011-01-26. <http://www.montgomeryboycott.com/article_overview.htm> Hasian Jr., Marouf. "Revisiting the Case of Plessy v. Ferguson". In Clarke Rountree. Brown V. Board of Education at Fifty: A Rhetorical Retrospective. Lexington Books. 2006 Hoose, Philip, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2009 Jet Magazine, Claudette Colvin: an unsung hero in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Feb 28, 2005, Johnson Publishing Co., <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1355/is_9_107/ai_n11834082/> Justia, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, <http://supreme.justia.com/us/347/483/ case.html> Justia.com, The Civil Rights Cases. Retrieved 2011-01-26. <http://supreme.justia.com/us/109/3/case.html>

King, Martin Luther Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A., Beacon Press, 2010. Lloyd, Natalie; Schamel, Wynell; Potter, Lee Ann. The 1963 March on Washington, Social Education, v65 n1 p18-25 Jan-Feb 2001. Wikipedia, The Civil Rights Cases, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Cases>