December 1 · This Day in America
It is a Thursday evening in Montgomery, Alabama, and Rosa Parks is riding home from her job as a department-store seamstress. The bus fills. The driver orders the Black riders in her row to stand so a white man can sit. Three move. Parks does not. She is forty-two, tired in a way that has nothing to do with her feet, and she has spent years as secretary of the local NAACP studying exactly this. The driver tells her he will have her arrested. She says he may do that. Police take her in for violating the segregation code. Within days, the city's Black residents stay off the buses entirely, and they keep walking for 381 days, until the Supreme Court strikes the law down. One woman, seated, declines to rise. A nation finally has to.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1862
One month before the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln sends his Annual Message to a Congress weary of war. Most of it is the ordinary business of a bleeding government. The ending is not. "We cannot escape history," he writes. The fiery trial through which they pass will light them down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. He asks them to free the slaves and so save the country. The clerk reads it aloud; the words outlast the war.
Source: www.archives.gov
“Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress, 1862