Rosa Parks sits in the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Dec 21, 1956

Remembering Rosa Parks. Rosa Parks Day

On Dec 1, 1955, Alabama native Rosa Parks took a stand when she refused to stand. Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to vacate a seat on a Mongomery bus in favor of a white passenger and was arrested and fined for this act of civil disobedience. Parks then helped lead a boycott of Montgomery buses that lasted for over a year. The year-long protest finally ended when the US Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s laws enforcing segregation on city buses and other modes of transportation were unconstitutional.

We're remembering Parks on the anniversary of her birth on Feb 4, 1913. Her act of defiance was a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle. Though some tried to paint the seamstress as an accidental martyr, Parks was already involved in the movement at the time of her arrest. She later said of the incident, '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.'