Rosa Parks

I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free... so other people would be also free.

"Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again."

Popularly remembered as the woman who quietly refused to give up her seat for a white passenger on a segregated bus, thereby launching the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks was already steeped in black politics long before her iconic arrest.




A secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP since 1943, she was well aware of the group’s attempts to challenge the Jim Crow laws on public transportation and supported their plans to instigate a bus boycott.



Rosa Parks reputes the common myth that her unwillingness to get up was due to aching feet. “No” she said, “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”



Although instrumental to the Civil Rights movement, Parks went on to live in anonymity after the protests, working as a seamstress for almost a decade and not receiving national recognition until later in life