R.I.P.

Rest in Peace, Dr. King. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was just a small piece of the vast contributions you made to our society. The amount of strife and turmoil you had to go through, both personally and physically, to achieve what you achieved is astounding and not without merit.

Today we honor you. And for centuries we will honor you. You are an inspiration.

This quote threw me for a loop

So in reading the wikipedia entry on the event (well, really skimming, it is wikipedia afterall), I ran across this quote:

"The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by Nixon and led by King, soon followed."

WHAT?! WTF?! SERIOUSLY! I stopped and stared at the screen in wide eyed disbelief. My entire world had been shattered and was crumbling around me... Richard Nixon planned the bus boycott? No freaking way... I stared and stared and stared. I told my roommate. He looked at me strangely. He said: "Are you sure they meant that Nixon?"

It then occurred to me there are other people named Nixon. In fact, this was in reference to E.D. Nixon, the president of the local NAACP chapter.

And suddenly all was right with the world... Richard Nixon is still an asshole.

Very embarrassed I didn't know this...

"The Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional."

from Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle

The boycott lasted for over a year?! Really? Man, I did not see that one coming. I'm sure I knew this at one point, definitely when I was a history student, but for some reason as the years went by the event whittled and whittled itself down to a mere fraction of this time. I think it's probably because when I was learning about it the following was true:

• I lived in a small Washington town where buses weren't really a thing.
• The idea of public transit to me was just as foreign as foreign things.

Probably because of that my brain thought... "Oh, I see... interesting, for a year they had to carpool."

I am a moron. And that moronic tendency probably made me slowly lower and lower the significance of this event... until eventually if someone would have asked me about it yesterday I would probably have answered: "Oh you know... like a month."

Now that I only get around with public transit the idea of bailing on it in any way shape or form completely astounds me. I really hope I'm not this ill-informed about other major historical events. That would probably destroy me.

What I thought I knew... beginning the quest

When I sat down to my computer this morning, extremely happy that I had the day off, I looked at some of the news, looked up some of the weird sports happenings yesterday, and then watched MLK Jr.'s speech "I Have a Dream." I thought about all that Martin Luther King, Jr. had done for the country, and started looking at some historical facts about the Reverend.

Then I saw some of the basic, bare bone facts about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Shit. I thought I knew so much about that, about American history, about this and that... but somehow I got like 90% wrong in terms of knowing the details of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In fact, I'd go out on a limb and say that I'm a complete fucking moron when it comes to the bus boycott, arguably one of the most important events in American History, and certainly one of the most important events in the 20th century. I thought about it, and I knew absolutely nothing.

After putting my mind to work, I thought about all the facts I could figure out about the bus boycott, and these are the few I could come up with:

• MLK Jr. was there.
• It happened in Alabama.
• African-Americans didn't ride the bus for an unknown period of time.
• The whites got pissed.
• Rosa Parks started it.

Thats it.

I'm a moron. And I'm a History minor.

I couldn't let this go on, so I began reading articles around the internet. I know that this is in no way an adequate tribute to Doctor King. But to a man who has done so much for this nation and this world, I can't think of much that is. So I began reading, and learning about just one of the many amazing moments MLK was involved in.