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History & Celebrations Today – December 1

Celebrations Today – December 1

Holidays and observances

Celebrations Today – USA: December 1

National Pie Day
National Eat a Red Apple Day
Bifocals at the Monitor Liberation Day
Day With(out) Art Day
Rosa Parks Day
Faux Fur Friday – First Friday in December
National Christmas Lights Day
National Civil Air Patrol Day
National Day Without Art
World AIDS Day

Today in US History: December 1

Rosa Parks Arrested

I did not get on the bus to get arrested; I got on the bus to go home.From Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Quiet Strength
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 1994), 23.

a woman being fingerprinted
Woman Fingerprinted. Mrs. Rosa Parks, Negro Seamstress, whose Refusal to Move to the Back of a Bus Touched off the Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Ala., 1956,
New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.
Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

Rosa Parks: “Why do you push us around?”
Officer: “I don’t know but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.”From Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed, Quiet Strength
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub. House, 1994), 23.

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Blacks also were required to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.

Rosa McCauley was born on February 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. In 1932,  she married Raymond Parks and with his encouragement earned a high school diploma. The couple was active in the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). While working as a seamstress, Mrs. Parks served as chapter secretary and, for a time, as advisor to the NAACP Youth Council. Denied the right to vote on at least two occasions because of her race, Rosa Parks also worked with the Voters League in preparing blacks to register.

Detail of sheet music
“We Shall Overcome,” Silphia Horton, Frank Hamilton, Guy Carawan, and Pete Seeger, New York: Ludlow Music, Inc., 1963.
Music Division
Courtesy: Ludlow Music, Inc., 11 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 in The Civil Rights Era: Part 2, Sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and Demonstrations, African American Odyssey

Probably first used in 1945 by striking South Carolina tobacco workers, “We Shall Overcome” became the anthem of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The protest song’s first separate publication, shown above, credits Silphia Horton of the Highlander Folk School with shared authorship.

Following the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the NAACP choose Rosa Parks to attend a desegregation workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Reflecting on that experience, Parks recalled, “At Highlander I found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society…I gained there the strength to persevere in my work for freedom not just for blacks, but for all oppressed people.”

Although her arrest was not planned, Park’s action was consistent with the NAACP’s desire to challenge segregated public transport in the courts. A one-day bus boycott coinciding with Parks’s December 5 court date resulted in an overwhelming African-American boycott of the bus system. Since black people constituted seventy percent of the transit system’s riders, most busses carried few passengers that day.

Front page of the Montgomery Advertiser
5,000 at Meeting Outline Boycott; Bullet Clips Bus, December 6, 1955.
African American Odyssey
Courtesy: Montgomery Advertiser,
Copyprint from microfilm.
Serial and Government Publications Division

The success of the boycott mandated sustained action. Religious and political leaders met at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference). Dexter’s new pastor, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., was appointed the group’s leader. For the next year, the Montgomery Improvement Association coordinated the bus boycott and King, an eloquent young preacher, inspired those who refused to ride:

If we are wrong—the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong—God almighty is wrong! If we are wrong—Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth. If we are wrong—justice is a lie. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” 1Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, 1955.

During the boycott, King insisted that protestors retain the moral high ground, hinting at his later strategy of nonviolent resistance.

This is not a war between the white and the Negro but a conflict between justice and injustice. If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. 2Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, 1955.

In December 1956 the Supreme Court banned segregation on public transportation and the boycott ended over a year after it had begun. Rosa and Raymond Parks moved to Detroit where, for more than twenty years, the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement” worked for Congressman John Conyers. In addition to the Rosa Parks Peace Prize (Stockholm, 1994) and the U.S. Medal of Freedom (1996), Rosa Parks has been awarded two-dozen honorary doctorates from universities around the world.

Rosa Parks died on October 24, 2005, at the age of ninety-two, at her home in Detroit, Michigan. On October 30, 2005, Parks became the first woman to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

Learn more about Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement:

1. Martin Luther King Jr. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Intellectual Properties Management in Association with Warner Books: 1998), 60. (Return to text)

2. King 1998, 81. (Return to text)

Pas de deux

manuscript page
Agon, title page of the holograph score for two pianos, 1957.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress

On December 1, 1957, the New York City Ballet premiered Agon, a collaboration between composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and choreographer George Balanchine (1904-1983). The “Pas de deux” choreographed by Balanchine to the music of Stravinsky and danced by Diana Adams and Arthur Mitchell became a defining moment in ballet history.

Both Russian émigrés, Stravinsky and Balanchine fled their homeland after the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and eventually settled in the United States. Stravinsky dedicated Agon’s score to Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, founders of the New York City Ballet.

Portrait of Arthur Mitchell
[Portrait of Arthur Mitchell],
Carl Van Vechten, photographer,
December 20, 1955.
Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964

Stravinsky was the most important composer of ballet music in the twentieth century. He rose to international fame in 1910 for his work with the Ballets Russes, an innovative company founded in Paris by fellow Russian Sergei Diaghilev that launched the careers of major artists including dancers, choreographers, composers, and designers. In 1928, Stravinsky worked with Balanchine, then a choreographer for the Ballets Russes, to produce Apollo (using Stravinsky’s Apollon musagète), the first work in their extraordinary and enduring creative partnership.

Balanchine’s and Kirstein’s founding of the New York City Ballet in 1948 gave Balanchine the platform he needed to create a series of masterpieces in which his choreography collaborated with Stravinsky’s music. Agon was among these. Some of the dances in Agon, an abstract, plotless ballet for eight female and four male dancers, were suggested by a description of seventeenth-century French court dances. Recueil de dances, composées par M. Feuillet, a compilation of works choreographed by Raoul-Auger Feuillet and bound with his Chorégraphie, ou l’art de décrire la dance par caractères. . . is a work from that very era. It is one of more than 200 dance manuals in An American Ballroom Companion: Dance Instruction Manuals, ca. 1490-1920. Many of the manuals provide historical information on theatrical dance. A special presentation, Western Social Dance: An Overview, includes sections on Renaissance Dance and Baroque Dance, performance traditions that influenced both Stravinsky and Balanchine.

Today in History – December 1-External Links

Today’s Weather in History
Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia