RUSH CALLS FOR RETURN TO SEGREGATED BUSES

You've got to hand it to Rush Limbaugh. Just when you think that bloated Nazi gasbag can't get any more despicable, he somehow tops himself. On his radio program Tuesday, Rush was busy fanning the flames of hatred, as usual, devoting the entire show to a white teenager getting beaten up by a black teenager on a schoolbus. Rush cited the incident as an example that President Obama is spreading racism against white people in America.

Even though local law enforcement said the fight was probably not racially motivated, Limbaugh said: “I think the guy’s wrong. I think not only it was racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that’s the lesson we’re being taught here today. Kid shouldn’t have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses — it was invading space and stuff. This is Obama’s America.”

(A full transcript of Tuesday's show can be found at mediamatters.org.)


Unabated, Rush continued the diatribe Wednesday: “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” Limbaugh also said. “I wonder if Obama’s going to come to come to the defense of the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard.”

"Obama's America?" What would Rush Limbaugh's America look like? Or, should I say, what DID it look like?

Segregated, separate and unequal. Buses, like everything else, were divided by race. Thankfully, Americans rejected Rush Limbaugh's America, but not without a struggle. It took a tired, middle-aged lady from Alabama named Rosa Parks to challenge segregated buses back in 1955. Her courage sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and moved a nation toward equality and civil rights.

An unlikely hero: Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, 1955

December 1st, 1955. At 6 pm, Rosa Parks boarded the bus and paid her fare. She sat in the "colored" section of the bus. Bus driver James F. Blake noted that the front of the bus was filled with white passengers and there were two or three white men standing, so he moved the "colored" section sign behind Parks and demanded that four black people give up their seats in the middle section so that the white passengers could sit.

Parks refused to give up her seat. When Parks refused to move, Blake called the police, and an Alabama police officer arrested her. She asked the officer, "Why do you push us around?" The officer said, "I don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest." Parks later said, "I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind."

- a clip from Mighty Times, the Legacy of Rosa Parks, a documentary produced by Teaching Tolerance and Tell the Truth Pictures.