Dec 1 in history

[CaptainCrunch]

On December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks got on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and refused to give up her seat to a white person. When driver James Blake ordered her to give up her seat she refused.

When Blake threatened to call the police Rosa responded "'You may do that.'", 1955's equivalent to todays "Piss off"

she was arrested and charged under Alabama's segregation laws.

This caused a 381 day bus boycott which lead to the eventual end of the busSegregation laws.

[Bill Bumface]

Her second most influential act was inspiring Outkast to compose one of the greatest rap songs of all time.

[nik-]

And then suing them for it

[Buzzard]

Amazingly hard to believe that that was grounds for arrest in the United States, 11 years before I was born.

[Violator]

nsfw

[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by Buzzard

Amazingly hard to believe that that was grounds for arrest in the United States, 11 years before I was born.

I find it harder to believe it was as long ago as it was, with some of the stuff going on in the states these days you would think that the civil war had just ended last week.

[bc-chris]

stuff i learned from the history channel show '10 things you didn't know about'.....

from the civil rights episode:
This episode explores little-known details surrounding the American Civil Rights Movement and beyond.

• Civil Rights

1. Lyndon Johnson taught at a segregated school
2. Rosa Parks wasn't the first woman to refuse to give up her seat
3. Martin Luther King stopped Star Trek's only black actress from quitting
4. Zoot suits were outlawed during World War II
5. Malcolm X held a secret meeting with the Ku Klux Klan
6. The majority of the Black Panthers were women
7. A black student was jailed just for applying to college
8. Black and white basketball teams played championships years before the NBA
9. California had the most Jim Crow laws of any state
10. One Japanese American spent 40 years fighting his internment conviction

from wikipedia

Claudette Colvin is a pioneer of the African American Civil Rights Movement. On March 2, 1955, she was the first person arrested for resisting bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama.

...
She was forcibly removed from the bus and arrested by the two policemen, Thomas J. Ward and Paul Headley.[9][10][11] This event took place nine months before the NAACP secretary Rosa Parks was famously arrested for the same offense.[1] Claudette Colvin: "My mother told me to be quiet about what I did. She told me to let Rosa be the one: white people aren't going to bother Rosa, they like her".[3]

...

For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort because she was a teenager who was pregnant by a married man; words like "feisty", "mouthy", and "emotional" were used to describe her, while her older counterpart Rosa Parks was viewed as being calm, well-mannered, and studious. Because of the social norms of the time and her youth, the NAACP leaders worried about using her to symbolize their boycott.[1][2]

[tvp2003]

Amazing how much can change in 60 years. Today, the whole incident would have been videotaped and uploaded to YouTube, the social media reaction on twitter would be fast and vicious, and the driver would probably be holed up somewhere following death threats against him and his family traced through his Facebook account.