Chapter 1
How It All Started
“One evening in early December 1955 I was sitting in the front seat of the colored section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The white people were sitting in the white section. More white people got on, and they filled up all the seats in the white section. When that happened, we black people were supposed to give up our seats to the whites. But I didn’t move. The white driver said, “Let me have those front seats.” I didn’t get up. I was tired of giving in to white people.
“I’m going to have you arrested,” the driver said.
“You may do that,” I answered.
Two white policemen came. I asked one of them, “Why do you all push around?”
He answered, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.””
This is how Mrs. Parks starts her story—with the arrest that sparks the Montgomery bus boycott. Later in the book she’ll bring us back to this moment, providing additional detail and context, but for now, let’s stay with this moment and what she tells us of it.
Rosa Parks was 80 years old when she published these words. She had been telling the story of her arrest for nearly 37 years. She had told the story hundreds, if not thousands of times in public, to all sorts of audiences. Here at the beginning, and throughout “Rosa Parks: My Story”, in the way of some elders, she is direct, even blunt, while at the same time keeping a sense of perspective in which she is simultaneously actor in and observer of her own story.
Mrs. Parks describes her motive in one sentence: “I was tired of giving in to white people.” This was a conscious political act on her part—an act of defiance against a legal and social system that defined her and her people as second-class citizens.
Notice too the air of calm amid the tension. When the bus driver says he’s going to have her arrested, Rosa Parks says simply, “You may do that.”
The calm extends to at least one of the police officers. When she asks, “Why do you all push us around?”, he replies, “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.” He’s just doing his job.
Why so calm? There are at least two main reasons which will be woven throughout the book:
- Jim Crow was a deadly political structure, to be challenged only with great care and preparation; and,
- Rosa Parks had been preparing for this moment for most of the previous 42 years of her life.
Explaining those two reasons will be the subject of most of the book.
