Dec. 1, 1955
Four days after hearing civil rights leader Dr. T.R.M. Howard describe what happened to Emmett Till, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
“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,” she said. “No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
This was far from her first civil rights protest; it wasn’t even her first protest on a bus. In 1943, she boarded a bus to go to the clerk’s office so she could register to vote. When the white driver demanded she re-board the standing-room only bus by entering from the back, she got off, waited for the next bus and swore she would never ride again with that driver.
Her arrest in 1955 sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Weeks after her first arrest, she was jailed again, this time for her role in the boycott, helping arrange carpool rides for Black workers. When she received death threats and lost her job as a seamstress, she and her family were forced to move to Detroit, where they struggled financially until Congressman John Conyers Jr. hired her.
She continued to work on issues such as poverty, health care, housing and police brutality until her death in 2005.
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