Jackie Robinson and Rosa Parks: Creating Political Space—Pathfinding Actions

Abstract

In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, and when the future forty-second president, William Jefferson Clinton, was attending Oxford University in Britain, an Oxford Union debate saw the motion—that American democracy had failed—carried by 266 votes to 233. Clinton, however, would defend his country’s foreign policy by citing the cause of civil rights. His argument was that while civil rights had taken far too long in his country, nearly two hundred years too long, American-style democracy had shown its ability to self-correct, to adapt to the demands that its difficult history had placed upon it.¹ Clinton’s argument about civil rights is an interesting one that will be examined closely in this chapter, which focuses on two different pathfinders: the baseballer Jackie Robinson and a determined activist and citizen from the Deep South, Rosa Parks.