Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley considers Dec. 1, 1955, one of the most significant days in American history. He tells host Scott Tong why — it was the day Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man.
Brinkley is also the author of “Rosa Parks: A Life,” and contributor to the new National Geographic book “1,000 Days in America: An Illustrated History of the Moments That Defined a Nation.”
Dec. 1, 1955, is the day Rosa Parks, a department store seamstress in Montgomery, Ala., flaunted segregation laws and refused to give up her seat on a public bus for a white man. She was then arrested. What does this moment tell us about the American story?
“There are two dates I always remember and one is D-Day, June 6, [1944], and Dec. 1 is the other. Because Dec. 1, 1955, with Rosa Parks’ dissent, triggered the civil rights movement in earnest… [It] set into motion Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
Rosa Parks’ arrest sparked a 381-day bus boycott led by King. There was a legal challenge that made its way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1956 that this bus segregation was unconstitutional. How monumental was that legal case?
“It was deeply monumental because it convinced the NAACP and Black America that the U.S. federal government was on their side and that they were no longer living in a Plessy v. Ferguson, Jim-Crow world.
“And so now it started raining lawsuits, challenging swimming pools, lunch counters, golf courses, you name it, [saying] that we had to be a fully integrated country. And so Parks is the one who deserves credit for doing that. And she stands as kind of an everyperson that all of us will talk about. You have a ‘Rosa Parks moment’ when you say no to a grave injustice you encounter.”
What did Parks and the bus boycott spark nationwide?
“Well, CBS News started covering civil rights and television and was just born. Nightly news would start showing the images of the South, and in the [1960s] [that] would lead to [the] barking German shepherd dogs and water hoses of Montgomery, going after children.
“Or Southern Baptists and [African Methodist Episcopal] devotees and others wearing Sunday clothes, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ or ‘Peace in the Valley’ or ‘Amazing Grace,’ and yet being provoked and attacked by white bigots. And it triggered… John F. Kennedy as president, taking on the civil rights mantle by backing James Meredith’s integration at University of Mississippi, by telling Gov. George Wallace of Alabama, ‘You’re wrong. Segregation is over.’
“And that even accelerated more so once Lyndon B. Johnson became president because he had the votes in the Senate to move things forward. And in rapid fashion, we started getting the Selma-to-Montgomery march and the [The Voting Rights Act of 1965.] We got fair housing after fights in Chicago, in Cicero, Ill. It became the full integration of America. And the movement died when Martin Luther King died in 1968.
“People are looking for when’s the next new civil rights movement in [America]? It may have come when Barack Obama was elected president. And for some people, we’re still looking for ways to fight racial injustice in this country. It’s an ongoing American pursuit to fight for equal rights and equal justice.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
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Julia Corcoran produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt and Emiko Tamagawa. Tamagawa also produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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