December 1st, 1955: In Montgomery, Alabama, a 42 year old black woman named
Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her her seat to a white passenger in the front section of a city bus.
According to
Wikipedia, her courageous act of civil disobedience was not the first such instance of it's kind, yet her act of defiance that day sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and created the modern Civil Rights Movement.
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My first concious exposure to the spectre of segregation was in the mid 1960's when my family passed thru a small Louisiana town and we stopped at a local laundramat to wash clothes. They had separate entrances for "Whites" and "Coloreds". I actually asked my mom why we had to separate our clothes outside and bring them in separate entrances! True story..
I was born in the South but probably spent equal amounts of time in the North and South growing up. I was actually pretty color blind in the racial sense until I got older and, sorry to say, developed some prejudices that I still struggle with to this day.
Growing up, we always had black or hispanic farm workers, nannies, and house servants and I played with their kids daily oblivious to what they might have been experiencing in their life.
In later years, I realized that my mom, who had been raised in the South, was always more tolerant and kind regardless of race than my Dad or Grandmother were (both from the North). In fact, my Grandmother was extremely racially intolerant all her life.
So, where were you when the Civil Rights Movement began?
