Rosa Parks rides on a Montgomery Area Transit System bus. Parks died Monday at age 92.
She sat.
The act, itself, seems simple. But on Dec. 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks did it, she single-handedly propelled civil rights to the forefront of the country's agenda.
Parks, the mother of the civil rights movement, died Monday in her Detroit apartment at age 92.
Because she defied the status quo, more than 50,000 people in Montgomery, Ala., walked rather than board segregated buses for 381 days; the U.S. Supreme Court desegregated public transportation; the profile of a little-known Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. rose; and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were passed.
Long after the marches, the sit-ins and the speeches, Parks' work continued.
For more than two decades, she was an assistant to U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. She established the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to honor her late husband and to motivate youth. She adored children, perhaps because she never had her own. And she was an author, finding time to write several books.
Here is an excerpt from her 1992 autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story.
- RODNEY THRASH, Times staff writer, and Carolyn Edds, news researcher
One evening in early December 1955 I was sitting in the front seat of the colored section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The white people were sitting in the white section. More white people got on, and they filled up all the seats in the white section. When that happened, we black people were supposed to give up our seats to the whites. But I didn't move. The white driver said, "Let me have those front seats." I didn't get up. I was tired of giving in to white people.
"I'm going to have you arrested," the driver said.
"You may do that," I answered.
Two white policemen came. I asked one of them, "Why do you all push us around?"
He answered, "I don't know, but the law is the law and you're under arrest."
For half of my life there were laws and customs in the South that kept African-Americans segregated from Caucasians and allowed white people to treat black people without any respect. I never thought this was fair, and from the time I was a child, I tried to protest against disrespectful treatment. But it was very hard to do anything about segregation and racism when white people had the power of the law behind them.
Somehow we had to change the laws. And we had to get enough white people on our side to be able to succeed. I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to the segregation laws in the South. I only knew that I was tired of being pushed around. I was a regular person, just as good as anybody else. There had been a few times in my life when I had been treated by white people like a regular person, so I knew what that felt like. It was time that other white people started treating me that way.
... People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. 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 forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
... As I sat there, I tried not to think about what might happen. I knew that anything was possible. I could be manhandled or beaten. I could be arrested. People have asked me if it occurred to me then that I could be the test case the NAACP had been looking for. I did not think about that at all. In fact if I had let myself think too deeply about what might happen to me, I might have gotten off the bus. But I chose to remain.
-- Word for Word is an occasional feature excerpting passages of interest from books, magazines, Web sites and other sources. The text may be edited for space but the original spelling, grammar and punctuation are unchanged.
