It was 70 years ago when four African Americans were sitting in the fifth row of a bus in Montgomery. As one white man had to stand towards the front, the driver asked the four to get up and move towards the back of the bus. Three did; one did not – the rest is history. Or so many American kids might think when they first read the story of Rosa Parks in school.

It is a story of courage, but, lest one forget, it is also a story about breaking the law. And the question for us today is what civil disobedience means in an era when the federal government is signaling its readiness severely to punish even perfectly legal dissent.

Before getting into any arguments about how disobedience can end up strengthening democracy, it is worth reminding ourselves that the textbook version of Parks is usually not the whole story. She was not just a fatigued seamstress who, after a long day, at work, spontaneously decided to protest against injustice. Rather, Parks had been a member of the NAACP in Montgomery since 1943; she had led the organization’s youth, and she had been investigating rapes of African American women in Alabama.

What Obama once claimed – “that any of us ordinary people without rank or wealth or title or fame can somehow point out the imperfections of this nation, and come together, and challenge the status quo, and decide that it is in our power to remake this country that we love until it more closely aligns with our highest deals” – is true,........

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