“We Didn’t Start The Fire” was a song released in 1989 by Billy Joel that the lyrics include brief, rapid-fire allusions to more than 100 headline events between 1949, the year of Joel’s birth, and 1989. Each and every event or person in that song were put there because they were significant in some way or another and had some sort of impact on the United States.
Wikipedia stated that Joel had gotten the idea for his song just after he had turned 40. He had a friend who had just turned 21 and said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!” Joel replied to him, “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful.” The friend replied, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties”. Joel retorted, “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.
Lyric Video for “We Didn’t Start The Fire”
For this assignment we had to choose one of the topics or people from the video above and “research and write” which is basically all the direction and instruction we received. So here we go! My topic was Alabama and I am focusing mainly on Rosa Parks arrested for sitting in “white only” area of bus, leading to boycotts.
Funnily enough I did a blog post on this topic back in grade 10, which basically gave a brief overview of what happened. This blog post is mainly going to focus on the importance and significance of what happened and why it was chose to be included in the song. Here is the link for that if you want to watch or read it, which I would recommend if you are not familiar with this topic. (scroll to bottom of blog post to see video)
Rosa Parks arrest was the start of something huge, the start of change and movements. In Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, African-American Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the “colored section” to a white passenger, after the “white section” was filled, as was the law at that time. She was then arrested for her act of defiance. That arrest resulted in demonstrations and a boycott of Montgomery buses by African-Americans that lasted until December 1956.
Since the boycott was costing downtown stores and white businesses considerable money, negotiations were made to stop the action. But it took a Supreme Court ruling in November 1956 that segregation on transportation is unconstitutional to finally integrate the buses. This event was also a starting point for the Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther King and others.
Rosa Parks was tired of what was becoming of segregation and didn’t want to wait around until someone else was going to do something that was going to make an actual impact. I don’t believe she did what she did knowing what the outcome was going to look like, but she went into it wanting change and that is exactly what she got. She started the first step forwards towards the end of segregation but most importantly the start of true equality. Without Rosa’s determination to fight for what she believed in, the first big step towards equality wouldn’t have been taking and who knows how much longer people would have had to wait around until someone else decided it was time to take a stand (seat).
But why was it chosen for this song? One of the many lyrics of such a powerful song? If it wasn’t clear enough to you through my post it was because Rosa Parks took a risk that not many people were willing to take and resulting in having one of the biggest lasting impact of the time. She is still today seen as one of the most resistant, strong, and loyal humans and changed the world for the better.
Here is a little video I put together to help show the impacts Rosa Parks had on the world…
https://youtu.be/9NCh6mlVivo
Also in the video there is music in the background but you can’t really hear the lyrics… It is this song I found on youtube called Rosa Parks and its pretty interesting if you listen to the lyrics.