Consider Rosa Parks’s refusal in Montgomery (1955), a simple no that helped catalyze a citywide boycott and a national reimagining of rights. Likewise, the Greensboro sit-ins (1960), begun by four students at a lunch counter, turned modest stools into platforms for structural change. Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless (1978) describes a greengrocer who quietly removes a propaganda sign—an act small in motion, monumental in meaning. These choices did not rely on spectacle; rather, they signaled a new pattern others could follow. As threads invite more threads, these gestures became seams that held a freer order together. Hugo’s fiction, in turn, dramatizes how such moral stitches reshape destinies. [...]
