In 1892, a man named Homer Plessy bought a first-class ticket for the East Louisiana Railway’s No. 8 train, traveling from New Orleans to Covington, Louisiana.
The whole thing was a setup.
Plessy was challenging segregation laws, and everyone involved knew it.
The conductor had been tipped off.
The committee organizing the protest paid for the private detective to ensure Plessy was charged with the crime they wanted to fight.
Even the railroad was on board—not for moral reasons, but because they didn’t want to pay for extra cars to accommodate different races.
Plessy spent a night in jail and had to post $500 bail. He was convicted as planned, lost his first appeal to the state supreme court as planned, and made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court—as planned.
Then everything fell apart.
The Supreme Court voted 7 to 1 to uphold Plessy’s conviction, and enshrined the idea of “separate but equal” into U.S. constitutional precedent, paving the way for decades of Jim Crow laws and legal discrimination.
His lawyers misjudged the Supreme Court—and suffered from bad timing. Between the time Plessy was arrested and the time it reached the court, three potentially anti-discrimination justices had died, and were replaced with men who had actually served in the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Also, the reason there were only eight justices voting was that one of them had to skip the oral argument because his daughter was sick.
Bad luck, bad timing, judicial buzzsaw—and bad law.
Rosa Parks
Sixty-three years later, in the summer of 1955, a woman named Rosa Parks traveled to the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee for a two-week workshop on implementing school desegregation.
She’d been secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter since 1943. She’d spent years investigating cases of racial and sexual violence, trying to get justice in a system designed to deny it. It had taken Parks three attempts even just to register to vote, navigating poll taxes and literacy tests designed to humiliate.
She arrived at Highlander that summer exhausted and burned out—”tense and maybe somewhat bitter” as she later put it.
On the last day of the workshop, someone asked what she would do when she returned to Montgomery to keep up the fight.
Nothing, she replied. Montgomery was the Cradle of the Confederacy. White resistance was too high and Black people wouldn’t stick together. She promised to go back and keep working with her NAACP Youth Council, but things seemed futile. That was all she could offer.
But then, on December 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.
The boycott
Unlike Plessy’s carefully orchestrated arrest, Parks’s refusal wasn’t planned ahead of time. But E.D. Nixon and the Montgomery NAACP had been looking for the right test case for years—something Parks certainly knew. When she was arrested, Nixon saw his opportunity.
Sitting in her home later that evening, he convinced Parks—and her husband and mother, despite their fears—that she should become the plaintiff. She was 42 years old, a woman of unquestioned honesty and integrity, someone with the firm quiet spirit that would be needed for the long battle ahead.
She was convicted the next day, fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. Her appeal would eventually get tangled in Alabama state courts and go nowhere—the appellate court upheld her conviction on a technicality. But by the night of her conviction, 35,000 flyers had already been mimeographed and distributed to Black schoolchildren, telling their parents about a one-day bus boycott.
Over 95% of Black Montgomery refused to ride the buses on December 5th. That afternoon, community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and chose a 26-year-old minister new to town—Martin Luther King Jr.—to lead what would become a 381-day boycott.
Meanwhile, attorney Fred Gray and NAACP lawyers made a crucial strategic decision. They wouldn’t wait for Parks’s state court appeal. Instead, they filed a federal lawsuit—Browder v. Gayle—on behalf of other women who had been arrested for the same offense that year.
On June 5, 1956, a federal court ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision that November.
‘Tired of giving in’
Parks wasn’t even a plaintiff in the case that actually overturned bus segregation, but she was the one whose story sparked the boycott. The woman who thought nothing would happen in Montgomery because people wouldn’t stick together had just helped lead a year-long movement where 50,000 people walked to work, organized carpools, held mass meetings at churches, and sustained each other through economic hardship and threats and violence.
Years later, she reflected on that day:
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then.
I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
The personal cost was enormous. Parks lost her job at the Montgomery Fair department store. Her husband Raymond was fired from his barbershop job when his boss forbade him to talk about the case. They faced death threats and financial ruin. Eventually they left Montgomery for Detroit, where Parks would spend decades continuing her activism until her death in 2005.
Plessy and Parks were both brave, strategic and justified. But Plessy walked into a judicial buzzsaw essentially alone. Parks walked with a community ready to walk with her.
She had 50,000 people alongside her because leaders had spent years organizing, registering voters, investigating injustices, and building the infrastructure that could sustain a year-long boycott.
Walk boldly and for the right cause. And when you see people doing that, walk with them.
7 more optimistic things from this week
Sunday, November 30: “I’m never pleased with anything, I’m a perfectionist, it’s part of who I am.” — Michael Jackson, whose “Thriller” was released on November 30, 1982. It became the best-selling album of all time with over 67 million copies sold worldwide, won 8 Grammy Awards, and broke racial barriers on MTV.
Monday, December 1: “When I’m through, about everybody will have one.” — Henry Ford. On December 1, 1913, Henry Ford installed the first moving assembly line for mass production of automobiles at his Highland Park plant. The innovation reduced the time to build a Model T from more than 12 hours to just 93 minutes.
Tuesday, December 2: “I wanted to leave a small mark in the world.” — Barney Clark. On December 2, 1982, retired dentist Barney Clark became the first person to receive a permanent artificial heart—the Jarvik-7—at the University of Utah Medical Center. Though he lived only 112 days, his courageous decision to volunteer for the experimental procedure advanced cardiac medicine and paved the way for modern artificial hearts and ventricular assist devices.
Wednesday, December 3: “Merry Christmas” — Neil Papworth. On December 3, 1992, 22-year-old engineer Papworth sent the first SMS text message from a computer to Richard Jarvis’s mobile phone on the Vodafone network. That simple “Merry Christmas” launched a communication revolution—today, over 23 billion text messages are sent every day worldwide.
Thursday, December 4: “The Observer is Impartial” — The Observer’s founding principle. On December 4, 1791, the first edition of The Observer was published in Britain, making it the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper. Still publishing today after more than 230 years, it set the precedent for Sunday journalism and provided news on a day when other papers didn’t publish.
Friday, December 5: “Love of learning is the guide of life.” — Phi Beta Kappa motto. On December 5, 1776—in the midst of the Revolutionary War—five students at the College of William & Mary gathered at Raleigh’s Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia to found Phi Beta Kappa, America’s first academic honor society.
Saturday, December 6: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” — 13th Amendment, Section 1. On December 6, 1865, Georgia became the 27th state to ratify the 13th Amendment, reaching the three-quarters majority needed to abolish slavery in the United States.
Thanks for reading. See you in the comments!
Thanks for the history behind Plessy and Rosa Parks. Willful ignorance of Black history here in America has led to far too many problems centered around race; all so unnecessarily too.
My mom’s uncle and first cousin along with their respective families lived in Montgomery at the time; still do, I guess but have lost touch. At any rate, as one of THE families there they had lots of Black help. Everyone summered in the mountains where I lived so we heard all about the boycott, the marches and all the riots that all happened during the ‘50s and ‘60s. They sure did set a lot of white hair on fire. “The Help” showed it pretty accurately.
Discrimination is human nature, we all want to be with our own tribe. I like to think I treat everyone equally, but I know my initial is not. Luckily it’s just the initial thought and I can change my thoughts. I doubt we will ever be free from discrimination despite all the good promises.
Despite all his personal issues, Michael Jackson was an incredible artist who changed the music and dance world. I still listen to Thriller and Off the Wall, the soundtrack of my young adulthood. I wonder how bigots would view his musical catalogue.
Henry Ford was way before his time! He also changed the world in good ways. Or maybe not. Where would we be without assembly lines?