When Rosa Parks Took a Stand

Fifty years ago today, December 1, 1955 - like today, a Thursday, for those who care - Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white man, sparking the civil rights movement. Mrs. Parks, who died a few weeks ago, was honored by transit systems all across America for her act of defiance with the simple act of leaving the front seat behind the driver's seat on buses vacant for a day.

Much has been made of how Mrs. Parks's simple act helped bring down racial segregation and opened new opportunities for blacks and other minorities, but it seems more like a Pyrrhic victory these days - and not just because people of different races have willingly resegregated themselves into cliques along racial and ethnic lines, and not even because of the persistence of racism. Consider what Mrs. Parks herself helped desegregate - city buses.

When Mrs. Parks rode the bus to and from her seamstress's job in Montgomery, America's love affair with the automobile was about to go whole hog. The nation's public transit systems were already being made undesirable by replacing streetcar lines with buses; most public transit experts will tell you that streetcars provide smoother, swifter rides than buses, and they're also cleaner and more efficient. In 1956, the year Montgomery desegregated its public transit system, President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act, which led to the construction of 41,000 miles of expressways and tilted the government even farther toward supporting cars over public transportation. Also by 1956, the automobile suburbs - at the time limited to whites fleeing the cities - were already developing at an amazing clip. Within twenty years, Mrs. Parks's actions no longer mattered; buses may have been racially desegregated, but a new form of transportation apartheid took hold. By the seventies, only the poor rode city buses. The rich and the middle class mostly drove on the expressways, and what public transportation they took were commuter trains and suburban commuter buses - the latter providing more comfortable seating at a higher fare than city lines.

And here's one other thing you won't hear from anyone else - if Mrs. Parks were a 43-year-old blue-collar middle-class worker today, as she was fifty years ago, she'd be driving a car to get to and from work, too.