Rosa Parks

It's Rosa Parks day.  On December 1st, 1955 she refused to give up her seat on the bus, earning a place in history books as a pioneer of the US civil rights movement in the process.

The picture on the right is a diagram of the bus showing where she sat.  Under the system of segregation which was in place on Montgomery buses at the time white people sat in the front seats and then filled rows towards the back.  Black people filled the bus from the back seats forwards, often having to pay the driver and then walk around to the back of the bus to use a separate door.  Once the bus was full, the front row of black people were expected to stand up for any new white customers who boarded.  Rosa Parks refused, so the bus-driver had her arrested.

Sometimes drivers would take money from black customers and then drive away before they had time to walk around to the back of the bus to board. This had happened to Rosa Parks several years earlier.  The bus-driver who left her standing in the rain that day? Same guy.

From her autobiography:

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.