Meet the Real Rosa Parks
Sixty years ago today, an African American woman committed the most famous act of civil disobedience in American history.
Unfortunately, fame does not guarantee accurate historical memory. The real Rosa Parks is far more interesting than the mythical figure of the popular imagination.
Most people have the basics right: Parks got arrested for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. Her brave stand sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, kicked off the the Civil Rights Movement and helped anoint Martin Luther King as its leader.
The conventional telling casts our heroine as a humble department store seamstress merely minding her own business on her commute home. Shortly after her arrest, explaining her decision to stay put that day, Parks allegedly said, “I was just plain tired, and my feet hurt.”
Scholars have struggled to confirm the veracity of that quotation. The earliest instances I have found are secondhand quotations of the seamstress by Coretta Scott King and MLK’s Nobel Peace Prize posse.
In her 1992 memoir, Parks specifically disavowed the sore feet meme: “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…
