The difficult struggle for equal rights between men
50 years ago, precisely on July 2nd, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act that banned in the United States racial segregation that prevailed hitherto in various federal units of the great American nation.
The passage of the Act was the culmination of a movement started years before, more precisely at the end of 1955 in the face of an act of courage performed by a simple black seamstress Rosa Louise McCauley, better known as Rosa Parks.
Behold the march of events.
In Montgomery, capital of Alabama, the first rows of the bus were reserved by law for white passengers. Farther back there were the seats in which blacks could sit. On 1st December 1955, Rosa Parks took a bus on the way to go home from work and sat in one of the places in the middle of the bus. When the driver demanded that she and three other blacks to stand up to make way for whites who had entered the vehicle, Rose refused to obey the order and kept sat. On the face of it, she was arrested and taken to jail.
The silent protest of Rosa spread rapidly. The Women's Political Council organized from that episode, a boycott of city buses as a measure of protest against racial discrimination in the country. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of those who supported the action. The musician and activist Harry Belafonte also later stated that his life had changed completely after the day on which Luther King called him for support to the action of Rosa Parks, who became known as the "mother of the civil rights movements" in the USA.
Within days of the attitude taken by Rosa Parks, thousands of blacks refused to take the bus on the way to work. While public transport companies had started increasing losses, blacks went - often walking for miles - waving and singing in the streets, despite the insults and aggressions that received from people who consider themselves special and deny the right of next.
Less than a year later, on November 13th, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court abolished racial segregation on buses in Montgomery, and December 21st, 1956, Martin Luther King and Glen Smiley, white priest, came together in a bus and occupied front row seats.
Monitored daily by the press on national television and the most influential newspapers in the country, the case provoked outrage in American public opinion which helped President Johnson to pass along to Congress on July 2nd, 1964, the Civil Rights Act who is completing therefore 50 years, and is living proof of how difficult the struggle for implementation of equal rights between men, a goal which, however, can be achieved without violence, without aggression, without depredations, as Gandhi had shown decades before in his fight against the British Empire.
