#desegreg

DECEMBER 1 - ROSA PARKS

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the day Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Though she was not the first to resist bus segregation - preceded by Irene Morgan,Claudette Colvin and several others - Parks undeniably served as an important figure in the Civil Rights Movement.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” she wrote in her 1992 autobiography. “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.”

Parks’ many recognitions include the NAACP’s 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. Upon her death in 2005, she became the first woman to lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda.