essay

Rosa Parks has a special place in U.S. history as the mother of the civil rights
movement. In 1955, the black woman refused to relinquish her seat on a bus to a white
man in Montgomery Alabama, a violation of existing Jim Crow laws. This act of civil
disobedience became the spark that ignited the masses during the 1950’s and 1960’s in
protesting the racial inequalities. Although racism was and had been rampant in the
South, the laws that called for racially segregated seating on public transportation were
not enacted because of racial prejudice. Racial bias was centuries old but segregated
seating on buses in the South was a relatively new phenomenon that began in the late
19th and early 20th centuries. Most city transit systems were under private ownership at
this time and the proprietors of these systems had no financial reason to impose
segregation. The transit owners may themselves have been racists but they were in
business to earn money and they certainly could not profit by alienating much of their
transit patrons. The government, today widely viewed as a body that finds solutions to
such social problems, was the entity that created this problem in the first place.
Politics instigated the segregation of the races. The social pressures that
motivated the political process are very different from motivations that drive the
economic process. The Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised black voters ensured that
only white opinions mattered in the political process. An overwhelming majority of the
white voters was not needed to mandate racial segregation. If the minority of white
voters wanted segregation while others didn’t have an opinion either way on the subject,
this was adequate political clout because black opinion was of no significance in the
political arena after they lost the ability to vote. The motivations of the politics conflicted
with incentives of the economic system. Private owners of Southern transportation -najmi

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