Rosa Parks didn't act alone
Why it matters how we tell her story
When I was growing up up, we learned about Rosa Parks in school and what I remember is this: a lone, tired old woman got fed up, acted on a whim and “took a stand by just sitting down.” And oh wow hey she inadvertently sparked a big change and that was how we got Civil Rights. The key points that were impressed upon me: she was a old woman acting alone, on a whim and she didn’t mean to change the world.
It was years later that I learned the real version—and understood why the real version is much more powerful. To start, Rosa Parks was not old—she was just 42. She was not tired from being on her feet all day either. In her own words:
“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.”