We come now to the evening of Thursday, December 1, 1955. Rosa Parks flatly states, “I did not intend to get arrested. If I had been paying attention, I wouldn’t even have gotten on that bus.” She goes on to say, basically, that she was too busy to plan to get arrested and create a test case for a federal lawsuit. She had NAACP workshops to organize and mailings about election of NAACP officers to mail.
When she got on the Cleveland Avenue bus to go home, she reports that, “I didn’t look to see who was driving when I got on, and by the time I recognized him, I had already paid my fare. It was the same driver who had put me off the bus back in 1943, twelve years earlier.”
At the next stop, some white passengers got on and filled up the remaining seats. One white man remained standing, and the bus driver demanded that Mrs. Parks and the other three Negroes in her row give up their seats.
“I thought back to the time when I used to sit up all night and didn’t sleep, and my grandfather would have his gun right by the fireplace, or if he had his one-horse wagon going anywhere, he always had his gun in the back of the wagon. 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.”
Because we sometimes tend to focus on human weakness more than human strength, we have a definition for the trauma response called PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. We don’t have in common usage PTSO, post-traumatic stress order. I would argue that Mrs. Parks, sitting on the Cleveland Avenue bus at the Empire Theater stop in the city and county of Montgomery Alabama on Dec. 1, 1955, flashing back to childhood memories of her beloved grandfather, exhibited something like PTSO. She was in her right mind. When the driver, James Blake, said he would have her arrested, Mrs. Parks replied simply, “You may do that.”
“As I sat there I tried not to think about what might happen. I knew that anything was possible. I could be manhandled or beaten. I could be arrested. People have asked me if it occurred to me then that I could be the test case the NAACP had been looking for. I did not think about that at all. In fact if I had let myself think too deeply about what might happen to me, I might have gotten off the bus. But I chose to remain.”
Of such moments of decision are revolutions (sometimes) made.
You’ll note of course that it did not occur to Mrs. Parks “then” that she could be “the test case the NAACP had been looking for”. Given all the discussions and meetings she had been part of over the previous two years—with the Women’s Political Council, with the Montgomery NAACP, with the Montgomery NAACP Youth Council (of which she was the adviser), with the training at Highlander, with the conversations with Claudette Colvin and E. D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson and others—she had certainly thought about it before the evening of December 1. Within a few hours after her arrest she would be engaged in deep discussions about being a test case for the NAACP. But at the moment of her arrest, she was it seems (and is often common) focused on the moment itself, trying not to panic at the possibilities of what might happen, and striving (with great success) to maintain her dignity.
