History books taught us that Rosa Parks was a tired old seamstress who was too exhausted to give up her bus seat. But that’s a lie. Here are three more lies we should never believe about her.
She Wasn't Tired:
Schools taught that Rosa Parks was just a tired seamstress when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. But her refusal was intentional after she mistakenly got on the bus driven by a notorious racist because she couldn’t take her mind off of Emmett Till.
Parks was spiritually exhausted and, in a 1978 interview, explained: " [I] didn't tell anyone my feet were hurting…they wanted to give some excuse other than the fact that I didn't want to be pushed around." In her memoir, she wrote, "I was not tired physically…I was not old… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
She Wasn't New To The Movement:
Rosa Parks wasn't new to the Civil Rights Movement. She was true to it. For over a decade before the 1955 bus boycott, Parks was an NAACP secretary investigating sexual assaults. Some of her most impactful and dangerous work was representing Recy Taylor, who had been abducted and assaulted by white men.
She Was Ready To Fight:
She quietly refused to give up her seat, but Parks was about that action, not a believer in non-violence. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, she and her husband hosted political meetings at their home, sitting around a kitchen table covered with guns.
Anti-Blackness seeks to strip us of our agency. It's up to us to speak truth to power about our people, stories, and legacies and use it to fuel our continued movement toward liberation.