On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, a woman of color, the Civil Rights activist named Rosa Parks whom the United States Congress called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement," wouldn't give up her bus seat and refused to go to the back of the bus. Parks was briefly jailed but she and the leadership the NAACP chose, a newcomer, a 26 year old pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. , led a boycott for more than a year which crippled the bus line.
Rosa and Martin. Thurgood Marshall was part of the legal team that won the SCOTUS case, ending bus segregation.
Parks lost her job and King's home was attacked but the boycott stayed in place for 381 days.
On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation on buses in Alabama was illegal, depriving people of equal protection under the 14th Amendment.
Today,Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a man whose views on race once led a Senate committee to deem him unfit for a federal judgeship, is Donald Trump's choice for Attorney General, to head the Justic Department.
In 1986, during Sessions' confirmation hearings for the judgeship, witnesses testified that Sessions referred to a black attorney as "boy," described the Voting Rights Act as "intrusive," attacked the NAACP and ACLU as "un-American" for "forcing civil rights down the throats of people," joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was ok until he found out they smoked marijuana, and referred to a white attorney who took on voting-rights cases as a "traitor to his race." As Ryan J. Reilly reported, Sessions also faced allegations that he referred to a Democratic official in Alabama as a nigger.
Sherrilyn Ifill, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund has said this -"It's unimaginable that Senator Sessions would be the chief law enforcement officer for the nation's civil rights laws. This demonstrates that the president-elect is continuing to select individuals for his team that have a demonstrated record of hostility to equal rights and justice, and to civil rights."
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World AIDS Day is held on the 1st December each year and is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, show their support for people living with HIV and to commemorate people who have died. World AIDS Day was the first ever global health day, held for the first time in 1988.
As of December 1, 2016, each appointment to a presumed Donald Trump cabinet has expressed his or her hostility to LGBT rights.
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December 1, 2016
Addendum. Today would have been Matthew Shepard's 40th birthday.
