This day in 1955, Rosa Parks changed history

On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks’ refusal to relinquish her bus seat in violation of segregation laws in Montgomery changed the course of history. Parks’s arrest for refusing to surrender her bus seat to a white man sparked a 381-day bus boycott led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Far from being a diminutive seamstress who was weary from her work in a downtown department store, she was a political organizer and activist. At the time of her arrest, Parks served as a member of the Montgomery Voters League and secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP.

As she later wrote in her autobiography, “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.”

The world will long remember Parks’s courage in the face of injustice.