Rosa Parks and December 1, 1955: In Her Own Words

The police report is short. It puts the time at 6:06 p.m. on Thursday, December 1, 1955, and the place in front of the Empire Theatre on Montgomery Street in Montgomery, Alabama. It names the bus driver, J.F. Blake, and two officers, F.B. Day and D.W. Mixon. It says a Black woman on the bus had refused to obey the driver's order to give up her seat.

Her name was Rosa Parks. She was 42.

A familiar version of the story describes a seamstress too tired to stand after a long day of work. Parks corrected that story herself. "The only tired I was," she wrote in her 1992 autobiography, "was tired of giving in."

Who she was that evening

Parks worked at the Montgomery Fair department store downtown as an assistant tailor. She was also a seasoned civil rights worker. She had been secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP since 1943. That August, she had spent two weeks at a desegregation workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee.

She had also met this driver before. The Library of Congress notes that in 1943, Blake had made her get off his bus and reenter through the back door.

The bus

In a radio interview the next spring, Parks said she left work about 6 o'clock. She boarded a Cleveland Avenue bus downtown, at Court Square.

On Montgomery buses, the first 10 seats were reserved for white riders. Black riders sat behind them, and the line between the two sections could move back as the bus filled. Parks took a seat in the first row behind the white section.

When the bus reached the Empire Theatre, the driver told the four Black passengers in Parks's row to give up their seats for white riders, according to the arrest records at the National Archives. Three moved. She did not.

The driver called the police. Officers Day and Mixon arrested her. The charge, as the report puts it, was refusing to obey the orders of the bus driver. She was booked, fingerprinted, and held at the city jail.

In her own words

Parks explained herself many times over the years.

"I felt that, if I did stand up, it meant that I approved of the way I was being treated, and I did not approve," she said, in words the National Park Service quotes.

Later, in her 1994 book "Quiet Strength," she put it more plainly: "I did not get on the bus to get arrested; I got on the bus to go home."

In handwritten notes she kept about the arrest, now in the Library of Congress, she wrote of "what the criminal Jim Crow had done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world."

She was not the first. Nine months earlier, on March 2, 1955, a 15-year-old named Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and been arrested.

Four days

That night, E.D. Nixon bailed her out, with the help of Clifford and Virginia Durr.

By the next day, the Women's Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, was turning out leaflets calling for a one-day boycott of the buses on Monday, December 5, the day of Parks's trial. The National Park Service puts the number at 50,000.

On December 5, Parks was tried and found guilty. The penalty was a $10 fine and $4 in court costs. That afternoon, local leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. as its president. That evening, at a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, the crowd voted to keep the boycott going.

381 days

It lasted more than a year. Parks herself was not a plaintiff in the federal lawsuit that finally won the case. Attorney Fred Gray filed Browder v. Gayle on February 1, 1956. In June 1956, a federal court ruled that segregated seating on Montgomery buses was unconstitutional. On November 13, 1956, the Supreme Court affirmed.

The court's order reached Montgomery on December 20, and the boycott ended that day, 381 days after it began. On December 21, the buses ran integrated.

There is one more correction worth making. The well-known photograph of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted is usually captioned as her arrest on December 1. The Library of Congress identifies it as February 22, 1956, when she was arrested again, along with dozens of others, under Alabama's anti-boycott law.

After Montgomery

In 1957, Parks and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit. From 1965 to 1988, she worked in the office of Representative John Conyers. Congress awarded her its Gold Medal in 1999.

She died in Detroit on October 24, 2005, at 92. On October 30 and 31, her casket lay in honor in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. The Congressional Record described her as the first woman to receive that tribute. In 2013, a bronze statue of her was unveiled in National Statuary Hall.