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Anecdotally, one (broadly) lefty woman I knew didn't believe me when I told her that Americans in fact do not have a constitutional right to obstruct government agents ("so what, they're just supposed to protest on the side? Are you sure?"). I think some people just don't really understand what's allowed and what isn't for reasons that I can only speculate about. We may find this Karen someday shocked to be clapped in irons for attempting to burn down the ICE fulfillment center.
My opinion is that US schools do a really bad job of teaching the civil rights protests of the 1960s era. A lot of people unironically believe that Rosa Parks was just some random nice lady who was too tired to change seats on the bus that day, and that MLK Jr assembled a group of purely peaceful protestors who shamed the evil whites into doing the right thing. The reality is... a lot more complicated.
Furthermore they should teach that other countries have wide spread use of public transit and even wealthy people use it. Meanwhile in the US Rosa Parks made public transit a last resort option for those too poor to care about being stabbed.
Do you believe that the thing keeping people from being stabbed on public transit was that blacks had to give up their seats to whites when the bus was full?
It's kinda connected. The particular regulation isn't, but the practice that ultimately developed that having and enforcing a policy of removing disruptive people who are minority members would result in painful legal action whereas just letting shit happen wouldn't, was.
The radical policy of putting criminals in jail without segregating the bus would have permitted Montgomery to have avoided the bus boycott entirely.
Sure, but they were segregationists; it wasn't about crime.
Come to think of it, what was the point of separating blacks and whites? It's easy to think of Southern segregationists as moustache-twirling villains who wanted little beyond stigmatizing blacks and keeping them down, but perhaps there was an actual practical reason for this type of segregation?
My grandparents who remembered those days were very clear that the reason was to prevent blacks and whites from interbreeding. Nobody cared if black and white men mingled, although they usually didn't. Black and white women worked alongside each other regularly. But southern states briefly experimented with segregating their high schools by gender after brown v board. Racial vitriol was strongest for black men mixing with white women.
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