‘Tired of giving in’: Civil rights activist Rosa Parks born on this day in 1913

Rosa Parks, who fought for civil rights long before the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955, was born on Feb. 4, 1913.

Parks, in December 1943, joined and became secretary of the local NAACP chapter, which her husband, Raymond, already belonged to. Even before that she and her husband helped with the defense of the “Scottsboro Boys” – “nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931,” according to history.com.

She is best known, however, for the bus incident on Dec. 1, 1955, in Montgomery.

Parks, 43, got on the bus after work.

As per a city ordinance, she was supposed to sit in the back of the bus because she was black. The rear of the bus was full. She sat down beside a black man in the third seat from the front. Two other black men sat across the aisle.

“Two stops later, white passengers had filled up the front seats and were having to stand up. The driver told Mrs. Parks and the three men they would have to leave their seats.

All three men obeyed. Mrs. Parks, in what she insists was a spontaneous impulse, refused to move. The driver called police and she stayed in jail briefly until the $100 bond was posted,” wrote Ray Jenkins in The Patriot on March 5, 1956.

“I had given up my seat before, but this day, I was especially tired. Tired from my work as a seamstress, and tired from the ache in my heart,” Parks said. Later she said, “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 … No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Rosa Parks Day is celebrated either on her birthday, Feb. 4, or Dec. 1, the day she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger.

Parks’ actions on that day lead to a citywide boycott of the buses that resulted in the end of segregation on public buses.

Parks was found guilty and fined $10 plus court costs.

A few days after the incident, the black community created the Montgomery Improvement Association. The association elected a president – the Baptist preacher, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Black people stopped using the busses. Churches organized carpools. According to newspaper reports at the time, the boycott cost the bus line $3,200 a day. The boycott went on for more than a year, ending on Dec. 20, 1956, when the busses were desegregated.

It got worse long before it ever got better.

Rosa and her husband both lost their jobs right after the bus boycott started, according to biography.com.

Two years later, in 1957, Parks and her family moved to Detroit where her family lived but they couldn’t find work there either. Rosa took a job in Virginia but her employer, who had offered her accommodations for her mother and husband, did not follow through so she returned to Detroit.

Her husband, Raymond, who was a barber, had to receive more training in order to get a job. Rosa still couldn’t find full-time work then had to have surgery for an ulcer and again for a tumor in her throat.

By July 1960 the family was drowning in debt and had no income. In 1961 Raymond found work as a barber and she found work at a sewing company.

Parks continued to be involved in the civil rights movement. She volunteered in 1964 for the congressional campaign of John Conyers. After he won, she worked in his office from 1965 until 1988 when she retired.

She died Oct. 24, 2005, in Detroit, Mich., at the age of 92.

The front seats of buses in Montgomery and Detroit were draped in black ribbons in honor of her until her funeral. After death she flown to Montgomery where she lay in repose before a memorial service. She then was transported to Washington, D.C., to lie in honor in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.

After her body was returned to Detroit, she lay in repose in the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Her funeral on Nov. 2, 2005, was seven hours long.

Rosa Parks was born on Feb. 4, 1913. She died in 2005.BN

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