Fifty-five years ago today, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks stood up for equality by refusing to stand up on a bus and give her seat to a white person.
She was not the first African-American to do this, but her refusal to surrender her seat ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted over a year and left the public transit system with a crippling financial deficit.
The boyoctt is often credited with being the first shot fired in the civil rights battle and launching the civil rights career of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (shown here with Parks in a 1955 picture from the Wikipedia article).
I'm glad she did what she did, when she did.
Amazing woman!
"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."-- Rosa Parks, in Rosa Parks: My Story (1992)
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