In My Write Mind

“… was tired of giving in.”

So said Rosa Parks in her autobiography, My Story, written in 1992, some 37 years after she refused to give up her seat after a long day’s work, after a long time of being treated like a second-class citizen in the South.

“I wasn’t physically tired,” she said. “No more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day.” But for Ms. Parks, it wasn’t just a working day that had her tired. It was a working life — one filled with segregation and inequality — that led her to keep her seat, thus standing up for what she believed to be right. She knew what she was doing.

She was just tired.

Tired of counting rows each time she got on the bus. Tired of having to stand if the “whites only” section spilled over into the “colored” one. Tired of the humiliation. Tired of having to endure a lifetime of double standards. As a principal member of the local Montogomery, Alabama NAACP, she’d heard the stories of people who were jailed for their refusal to conform to the Jim Crow laws. She’d heard about what happened to young Emmit Till earlier that same year, how he was beaten to death for whistling at a white woman.

She heard all of that. Was tired of it.

She lived it. In fact, a member of the NAACP youth group had just gotten arrested a short time before when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white teen. The case wasn’t pursued.

It didn’t make her any less tired.

Some call Ms. Parks the “mother” of the civil rights Movement, because of her actions on that bus in December of 1955. She really wasn’t. She didn’t “birth” a movement. In fact, there were many, many blacks (as well as some whites) who were already in the planning stages of resisting the city’s racist laws. They were behind the scenes, according to Parks herself, waiting for the “right moment,” setting up boycotts of Montgomery’s transportation, parks, swimming pools and voting polls.

So she wasn’t the mother. She was definitely a strong representative.

All because she was tired after a long day working at her job at a downtown department store. She was tired, after working for years trying to come up with ways to combat the bigotry that permeated the South. Tired of fighting. She never meant to be the sole representative of the Movement. She just wanted things to be fair.

So she sat.

That action was the spark, the impetus, the beginning, the inspiration. It took courage to take a stand by sitting down.

Parks was bailed out the very night of her arrest, while simultaneously, the wheels were set in motion for a boycott of the bus system — one that lasted 381 days. 381 days!!! A young minister by the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. was called upon by the NAACP and the Women’s Political Council to spearhead the effort, thus giving the issue national attention.

A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Alabama’s racist public transit statutes.

Her not giving in cost her and her husband, as continuous threats of violence forced them to move from Alabama to Detroit, where she worked for Rep. John Conyers until she retired in 1988. That move was necessary.

As was the move she didn’t make — refusing to give up her seat almost 50 years ago.

Parks worried that young people take legal equality for granted and said that the older generation has “tried to shield young people from what we have suffered. And in so doing, we seem to have a more complacent attitude.” We see that today.

That’s why the need to educate those that have come after us is even more important than it ever has been. We can’t let the legacy of this important representative, this ignitor, this spark, be that of the title of an Outkast song.

In fact, during a 1995 interview with the Detroit Free Press, when asked what she would like people to say about her after she passed, Ms. Parks answered:

“I’d like people to say I’m a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings.”

So here we are, challenged to be ignitors, to be the change we want to see in the world. Yes, Rosa Parks, by sitting down, challenged us to stand up for what we believe to be just, to challenge the subtle racism that still permeates our so-called “free” society.

Please remember that Ms. Parks was 42 when she stood up. Not old by any means, but also not a young woman. So there’s time for us to play our part. She played hers to the fullest, finally succumbing to death on Monday night at 92 years of age.

She played a major role — one of ignitor — in making things better for us.

Now it’s our turn. And by playing our role, we will make it clear to whomever is listening that being tired isn’t a bad thing — even today. As long as the only tired we are is tired of giving in.

R.I.P. Rosa Parks (1913 - 2005)