Which of the following statements are true about Rosa Parks, the forty-two-year-old Black woman who refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in December 1955?
- It was Martin Luther King Jr.’s idea for Rosa to start the Montgomery bus boycott.
- Rosa’s case against the Montgomery, Alabama, city bus company for discrimination went all the way to the Supreme Court and won.
- Rosa lived in Montgomery the rest of her life, hailed as a heroine, working for a senator.
- In 1994, Rosa won the Nobel Peace Prize for her life-long commitment to civil rights activism.
- Rosa made a small fortune for her speaking engagements after becoming known as “The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.”
Will the real Rosa Parks please stand stay seated?
Believe it or not, all these statements, though often assumed true, are only partially true! There is so much more to this story of this amazing dedicated and admired woman!
- It was MLK’s idea to start the Montgomery bus boycott after Rosa was arrested. In her autobiography, My Story, Rosa wrote,
“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.”
- There was a case against the Montgomery, Alabama, city bus company for discrimination. And it did go all the way to the Supreme Court and won in 1956. But it was not Rosa’s. Browder vs. Gale won the victory; Rosa’s case was stalled by technicalities.
- Rosa was fired from her seamstress job as a result of her battle against the Montgomery bus company. She was virtually unemployable in Alabama. After moving to Detroit to avoid death threats and violence, Rosa worked for Congressman John Conyers from 1965 to 1988, giving her and her husband financial stability.
- Having been awarded many honors by the NAACP, President Bill Clinton, and others, Rosa became famous for her courage and activism. However, she was never even nominated for a Nobel prize.
- She was known as “The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement,” and Rosa did speak all over the nation, but she donated most of the money to civil-rights causes.
Rosa Parks’s Strength in the Lord
In her Southern community, Rosa became well aware of the dangers Black people faced every day. Her grandfather kept a shotgun ready and waiting to fight off the Ku Klux Klan. As a child, she picked cotton barefoot for twelve hours straight for fifty cents a day. White people pelted her with rocks as she traveled to and from school.
In his book 7 Women, author Eric Metaxas summarizes Rosa’s life, highlighting her spiritual strengths. Rosa was not only a civil-rights advocate but also a Christian and a lifelong member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
She endured hardships but gained strength from the story of the oppressed Hebrews in the book of Exodus and memorized Psalm 27: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid.”
As a child, she “learned from the Bible to trust in God and not be afraid.” She wrote “I felt the Lord would give me the strength to endure whatever I had to face. God did away with all my fear.”
Rosa Parks’s courage came from a place of faith in the God who loves all people equally, blessing us with rights that come only from Him.
Want to Learn More?
Watch this 4-minute YouTube bio “Rosa Parks: Civil Rights Activist”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8A9gvb5Fh0
Or find one of these books at your library or online bookstore:
Reflections by Rosa Parks: The Quiet Strength and Faith of a Woman Who Changed a Nation by Rosa Parks with Gregory J. Reed (Zondervan, 2018).
7 Women and the Secret of Their Greatness by Eric Metaxas (Thomas Nelson, 2015).
