Segregation on public buses eventually ended in 1956 after a Supreme Court ruling declared it unconstitutional in Browder v. NAACP joined her appeal, a case that languished in the Alabama court system. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.'Īs a result of her defiance, Parks was arrested and found guilty of disorderly conduct. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. In her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), Parks declares her defiance was an intentional act: 'I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. Four days before the incident, Parks attended a meeting where she learned of the acquittal of Till's murderers. She said her anger over the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till and the failure to bring his killers to justice inspired her to make her historic stand.

Intentional ActĪt the time, Parks led the youth division at the Montgomery branch of NAACP. The boycott was led by a newcomer to Montgomery named Martin Luther King, Jr. The boycott dealt a severe blow to the bus company's profits as dozens of public buses stood idle for months.

Instead they carpooled, rode in Black-owned cabs, or walked, some as far as 20 miles. Residents refused to board the city's buses. Her defiance sparked a successful boycott of buses in Montgomery a few days later. In 1955, Parks rejected a bus driver's order to leave a row of four seats in the 'colored' section once the white section had filled up and move to the back of the bus. Rosa Parks occupies an iconic status in the civil rights movement after she refused to vacate a seat on a bus in favor of a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama.

Rosa Parks by Rosa Parks