Civil rights historian Neil McMillen once told me that for the movement to have started, it needed the stage set and agency to push it forward.
Long before the late Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Ala., other African Americans had attempted to desegregate public transit in other states.
Take, for instance, the case of Homer Plessy. Plessy was a 30-year-old shoemaker. On June 7, 1892, authorities arrested and jailed Plessy for refusing to leave the white car of the East Louisiana Railroad.
The young Louisiana man was an eighth black and seven-eighths white, but Louisiana law saw him as black and relegated him to the "colored" section of the train.
Plessy took the case to state court, saying that Louisiana's Separate Car Act violated the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.
Those two amendments to the Constitution are known as part of the Reconstruction amendments.
The 14th Amendment makes former slaves citizens of the United States with all the rights and privileges of citizens. The 15th Amendment assures those citizens of the right to vote, regardless of color.
Yet, the state court ruled that the state could opt to regulate railroad companies that operated within the state borders. The railroad used by Plessy didn't cross state lines. Therefore, his case failed.
Plessy appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court with the same results.
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Plessy was guilty again. In its opinion, the nation's court established the "separate but equal" clause - that separate facilities for African Americans were legal as long as they were equal to white facilities.
The "separate but equal doctrine" quickly expanded to other venues, including restaurants, restrooms, physicians' offices and water fountains.
That legal doctrine held fast until 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down in Brown v. Board of Education, which called for desegregation of the schools.
And, as McMillen has pointed out in his book, "Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow," many years and many less effective civil rights movements chipped away at institutional racism in the South before 1954.
It was the double-V of World War II in which African-American soldiers struggled for victory in Europe and the Pacific and victory of access at home.
The pages of old African-American newspapers like the Chicago Defender told those stories. Pullman porters from the North dropped those papers in the South at nearly every train stop. Those who could read did and told those individuals who could not read.
There were basic struggles to survive economically. A burgeoning black middle class in the 1940s and early 1950s on Jackson's Farish Street played a large part in generating awareness by creating a vibrant community of small-owned businesses in the heart of the capital city.
Other victories that set the stage included Jackie Robinson's walk onto a major league baseball field in 1947 to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the all-white National League.
About the same time, the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, emerged in Chicago. Leaders worked to desegregate lunch counters and public transportation in the North.
Then, in April 1947 a group of CORE members, eight black men and eight white men, traveled on a bus to the upper South to test a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation on interstate bus travel unconstitutional.
When the bus stopped in Chapel Hill, N. C., four of the men, including Bayard Rustin, a later adviser to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were arrested and forced to work on a chain gang.
With the stage set, agency followed. And that happened when Parks, a well-respected woman in Montgomery, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus.
She was arrested, jailed and fined.
She also gave birth to the Montgomery bus boycott, which lasted 381 days. The emerging leader of the boycott became Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a young minister in Montgomery.
McMillen and other historians have seen Parks as an agent in history.
She also saw herself as one of many, as she pointed out in "Quiet Strength," her autobiography written in 2000. "Four decades later I am still uncomfortable with the credit given to me for starting the bus boycott. I would like (people) to know I was not the only person involved. I was just one of many who fought for freedom."
