In 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress and longtime NAACP secretary in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to move from her seat on a city bus to make room for a white passenger. She was arrested for violating segregation law, and local civil rights leaders saw her as a strong test case. The Women's Political Council called a one-day boycott on the day of her trial, and after she was found guilty it continued indefinitely. Black residents organized their own transport network and kept off the buses for 381 days. The boycott ended only after the courts ruled bus segregation unconstitutional in Browder v. Gayle. Parks later moved to Detroit and kept campaigning for civil rights, and she is remembered as the mother of the civil rights movement.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.