Rosa Parks' Historic Refusal—Essay
In the essay below, Rosa Parks describes what she was thinking as she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.
Rosa Parks sits in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1956, after the Supreme Court ruled segregation illegal on the city bus system. Source: © Bettman/CORBIS.
Primary Source
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.
The driver of the bus saw me still sitting there, and he asked was I going to stand up. I said, “No.” He said, “Well, I'm going to have you arrested.” Then I said, “You may do that.” These were the only words we said to each other. I didn't even know his name, which was James Blake, until we were in court together. He got out of the bus and stayed outside for a few minutes, waiting for the police.
As I sat there, I tried not to think about what might happen. I knew that anything was possible.…
Excerpt from “The Front of the Bus, an essay” by Rosa Parks, 1955. Colbert, David, ed. Eyewitness to America. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997, p. 526.
Background
Many people across the country worked hard to win equal rights for all people in the United States. One activist in the Civil Rights Movement was Rosa Parks. Her actions on a bus led to a boycott of the Montgomery buses and, later, to a change in the law about segregation. In Montgomery in 1955, bus seats were segregated. African Americans were expected to give up their seats for white people. On Thursday, December 1, Rosa Parks was riding home after a day at work. When she was asked to give up her seat for a white man, she refused.
Following the successful Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott from 1955–1956, African American leaders moved to integrate public transportation in other southern cities, including Tallahassee, Florida. In May 1956, Reverend Charles Kenzie “C.K.” Steele was elected president of the Inter-Civic Council, which was formed to boycott Tallahassee's city bus company after two African American college students were arrested for sitting in the “whites only” section of a city bus. It took more than two years and continued sacrifice and struggle to achieve the integration of the Tallahassee city bus system in 1958.
