Rosa Parks finished a strenuous work day as a seamstress on December 1, 1955, clocking out at 5 p.m. and making her way to the bus stop. Though she was physically tired, the crowd at the bus stop was already thick, so she decided to kill some time and let it die down. She walked to a nearby drug store to pick up a heating pad, but they cost too much, so she settled on aspirin and a few other items before going back to the bus stop to wait for her ride home.
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According to “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Life of Rosa Parks,” when the 42-year-old boarded the bus, she made her way to a centrally located “racially neutral” section. It was behind a portable sign labeled “colored,” but close enough to the front that if white people needed a seat, Jim Crow laws mandated that Black people would need to move further back.
At first, Parks and three other African Americans sat in the section with no problems, but after a couple of stops, more white people boarded the bus until the only seats left open were toward the back. One white man needed a seat, and bus driver James F. Blake told all four Black people to move because law dictated that they could not sit parallel to whites on a bus. The other three Black people, two women and a man, begrudgingly moved. But when Parks sat quietly, firm in her position, Blake walked over to her and asked, “Are you going to stand up?” to which Parks replied a simple, “No.”
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She was inspired to take action by recent events
Later Rosa Parks said, “When I made that decision I knew I had the strength of my ancestors with me.” That’s because despite what some have been led to believe, Parks wasn’t just a tired, middle-aged woman whose feet hurt. In reality, she was a civil rights activist who grew up with a grandfather who sat vigil at night with a shotgun in case the Ku Klux Klan showed up. Parks knew his stories and his scars and had been inspired to take action against the inequities Blacks faced every day. When the bus driver threatened to have her arrested, she calmly said, “You may do that.”
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Rosa Parks was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, and spent her life under the oppression of racism and segregation. She moved to Montgomery, where she met and married a barber named Raymond Parks when she was 19. Raymond was already an activist in the racial injustice arena, so the couple, who never had children, dedicated their lives to working toward racial equality. In 1943, Rosa was elected secretary of the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
By the time December 1, 1955 came around, Parks was in charge of the youth division of the NAACP, and the acquittal of the two white men who viscously killed 14-year-old Emmett Till was fresh in her mind. She had also been inspired by the actions of 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who in March of that year refused to give her bus seat to a white woman, which ended in Colvin’s arrest.
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‘Tired of giving in’
Rosa Parks didn’t get on the bus that day planning to make a big stand. Rather, when the moment presented itself, a lifetime of subjugation and fresh injustices sat on her shoulders, and she knew she had to take action. Her simple refusal to give up her seat for a white person sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. They called national attention to the issue, and a case challenging the bus segregation laws made it to the Supreme Court, where the law was deemed unconstitutional. But none of that happened just because Parks didn’t feel like moving that day.
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“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true,” she said (via National Women’s History Museum). “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
