Showcase your love for the civil rights icon Rosa Parks with our original and feminist AF merch!
In 1955, at the age of 42, Rosa Parks refused a bus driver’s order to give up her seat in favor of a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. For that refusal, she was arrested and later found guilty of disorderly conduct. Her defiant – and intentional – act inspired an almost immediate (and successful) boycott of Montgomery’s city buses, dealing a severe blow to the bus company’s profits, as dozens of city buses sat empty for months. Instead of riding buses, residents organized and carpooled, rode Black-owned cabs or walked (some MANY miles).
As I mentioned, her act was intentional. Four days before her historic defiance, Rosa had attended a local meeting where she learned of the acquittal of the murderers responsible for the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till. In her 1992 autobiography, she explained the intention behind her refusal to give up her seat on that bus: “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 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
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