Photo/Illutration A plaque marking the spot where Rosa Parks boarded a bus is located in front of the office of Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in Montgomery, Alabama, on Dec. 15, 2017. (REUTERS/ Carlo Allegri)

Seventy years ago today, on Dec. 1, 1955, a Black woman was arrested in the southern U.S. city of Montgomery, Alabama. Her name was Rosa Parks (1913–2005), a 42-year-old seamstress. Her quiet act of defiance became a pivotal moment that ignited a surge in the Black civil rights movement.

That evening, after finishing her work, Parks boarded a city bus as usual. After she sat in the section designated for Black passengers—still governed by segregation rules—a white passenger boarded, and no empty seats remained.

The white driver ordered her to surrender her seat. She refused, and police took her into custody.

I find myself imagining what the other white passengers were thinking at that moment. Did they feel indignant, believing it only natural for a Black person to stand so a white passenger could sit? Or were they simply indifferent, unaware even of their own participation in discrimination?

In the end, no one said or did anything; the bus remained quiet. It seems to me that the heart of the problem lay precisely in that silence.

Also in the 1950s, Makoto Oda (1932–2007), a prominent postwar Japanese novelist, essayist, and peace activist, traveled throughout the United States and later recounted his experiences in his book “Nandemo Mite Yaro” (“I’ll Go and See Everything”).

He described how bus waiting rooms were rigidly segregated: spacious, clean facilities for white passengers, and cramped, dirty ones for Black passengers. Although Japanese people were themselves subject to discrimination by white Americans at the time, they were allowed to use the facilities reserved for whites.

Oda wrote that while he felt uncomfortable, he also felt a certain relief. In that moment, he realized he had begun to see Black people through “white eyes.” “Perhaps,” he reflected, “I was actually enjoying it.”

People can easily align themselves with the side that discriminates and, at times, become strikingly desensitized—even callous—to the suffering of those targeted by prejudice.

Parks, whose refusal to surrender her seat triggered the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, came to be revered as the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.” She died in 2005 at the age of 92.

While the name of the bus driver, James Blake, is occasionally recorded, the names of the other passengers have vanished entirely from history.

The world remains, in every corner, rife with discrimination.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 1

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.