My piece in the online Washington Post begins:
Shortly after 5 p.m., on a cool Alabama evening 60 years ago Tuesday, a 42-year-old woman clocked out from her job as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair Department Store. Rosa Parks walked westward along Montgomery Street to Court Square to board the Cleveland Avenue bus to make the 5-mile, 15-minute trek back to her apartment at Cleveland Courts to cook supper for her husband, Raymond.
Encountering a standing-room-only bus and having been on her feet all day operating a huge steam press, Parks decided to cross the street and do some Christmas shopping at Lee’s Cut Rate Drug while waiting for a less crowded bus. Around 6 p.m., as she boarded bus number 2857 at the corner of Montgomery and Moulton streets, Parks was about to change the course of the 20th century.
Here are five myths about what happened that first evening of December in 1955.
Here is an outline of what I cover:
- Rosa Parks sat in the whites-only section of the bus.
- If Rosa Parks had not moved, a white passenger would not have had a place to sit.
- This was Rosa Parks’s first conflict with that bus driver.
- Rosa Parks refused to stand up because she was tired.
- Parks was the first black woman to exercise civil disobedience on a Montgomery bus.
You can read the whole thing here.
For further reading, I recommend:
- Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks: A Life
- Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (see also her Washington Post piece on how history got her wrong)
