Contrary to myth, Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat 60 years ago today wasn't spontaneous

For years—despite what she wrote in her autobiography—the refusal of Rosa Parks to follow the orders of a driver on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus and change seats to accommodate a white passenger was mischaracterized as a spontaneous protest undertaken because she was tired. When she died 10 years ago, at age 92, that myth got debunked in a few places. Today, on the 60th anniversary of her protest, Justin Taylor at The Washington Post added a bit to that debunkery, taking on five myths related to the civil rights icon:

4. Rosa Parks refused to stand up because she was tired.

Parks sought to set the record straight: “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 was at the end of a working day. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” She later said she couldn’t have lived with herself if she had given in and stood up.

To attribute her action to fatigue would have pointed to weakness rather than to the source of her strength. She insisted that the power to love her enemies came from God: “God has always given me the strength to say what is right.”

In other words, she was not just a black woman who had had an extra bad day. She was a black woman fed up with Jim Crow laws forcing blacks to sit in the back of the bus, to use separate drinking fountains, restaurants, hotels, and to enter those establishments where they were allowed through the back door. And she was willing to take the risks that went with making public objections to segregation in one of the darker recesses of Dixie. People got killed for doing that. Because she was fed up, by the time she refused to move to another bus seat in late autumn, 1955, she had for years been part of a civil rights movement that was determined to break down racist barriers that made a mockery of the post-Civil War Amendments to the Constitution. As Aldon Morris wrote in his 1986 book Origins of the Civil Rights Movements:

[I]n the 1940s Mrs. Parks had refused several times to comply with segregation rules on the buses. In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks was ejected from a bus for failing to comply. The very same bus driver who ejected her that time was the one who had her arrested on December 1, 1955 … She began serving as secretary for the local NAACP in 1943 and still held that post when arrested in 1955 … In the early 1940s Mrs. Parks organized the local NAACP Youth Council … During the 1950s the youth in this organization attempted to borrow books from a white library. They also took rides and sat in the front seats of segregated buses, then returned to the Youth Council to discuss their acts of defiance with Mrs. Parks.