Rosa Parks Arrest Quotes

Arrest me for sitting on a bus? You may do that.

The freedoms that we have were purchased not just by those in uniform—and they definitely were—but also by those who took their lives into their hands, riding those Greyhound buses—the Freedom Riders, in the deep south, in the 1960s, who knew full well that they would be arrested, and they were, serving time, in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Rosa Parks, getting from the back of the bus to the front of the bus. Peaceful, nonviolent protest.

Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955. Early evening. A public bus pulls to a stop and a sensibly dressed woman in her forties gets on. She carries herself erectly, despite having spent the day bent over an ironing board in a dingy basement tailor shop at the Montgomery Fair department store. Her feet are swollen, her shoulders ache. She sits in the first row of the Colored section and watches quietly as the bus fills with riders. Until the driver orders her to give her seat to a white passenger. The woman utters a single word that ignites one of the most important civil rights protests of the twentieth century, one word that helps America find its better self. The word is “No.” The driver threatens to have her arrested. “You may do that,” says Rosa Parks. A police officer arrives. He asks Parks why she won’t move. “Why do you all push us around?” she answers simply. “I don’t know,” he says. “But the law is the law, and you’re under arrest.” On the afternoon of her trial and conviction for disorderly conduct, the Montgomery Improvement Association holds a rally for Parks at the Holt Street Baptist Church, in the poorest section of town. Five thousand gather to support Parks’s lonely act of courage. They squeeze inside the church until its pews can hold no more. The rest wait patiently outside, listening through loudspeakers. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd. “There comes a time that people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” he tells them. “There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November.” He praises Parks’s bravery and hugs her. She stands silently, her mere presence enough to galvanize the crowd. The association launches a citywide bus boycott that lasts 381 days. The people trudge miles to work. They carpool with strangers. They change the course of American history.

In just one example of many, Rosa Parks’s quiet but resolute refusal to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus at exactly the right moment coalesced into forces that propelled the civil rights movement. As Parks recalls, “When [the bus driver] saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ ”1 Contrary to popular belief, her courageous “no” did not grow out of a particularly assertive tendency or personality in general. In fact, when she was made a secretary to the president of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP she explained, “I was the only woman there, and they needed a secretary, and I was too timid to say no.”2 Rather, her decision on the bus grew out of a deep conviction about what deliberate choice she wanted to make in that moment. When the bus driver ordered her out of her seat, she said, “I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.”3 She did not know how her decision would spark a movement with reverberations around the world. But she did know her own mind. She knew, even as she was being arrested, that “it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind.”4 Avoiding that humiliation was worth the risk of incarceration. Indeed, to her, it was essential. It is true that we are (hopefully) unlikely to find ourselves facing a situation like the one faced by Rosa Parks. Yet we can be inspired by her. We can think of her when we need the courage to dare to say no. We can remember her strength of conviction when we need to stand our ground in the face of social pressure to capitulate to the nonessential.

Rosa Parks became the accidental catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. It was an evening in the winter of 1955 when she took her seat on the bus home from work, tired after her long day. She sat in the first row of the “colored” section of the bus, looking forward to a peaceful ride home. As the bus filled up, people were forced to stand. Noticing that white people were standing while black passengers were sitting, the bus driver moved the colored section sign back a row, ordering that Rosa and the others in her row stand up. However, Rosa refused to budge, and in retaliation, the bus driver called the police. Her arrest sparked the Civil Rights Movement, which would finally abolish segregation for good.

Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled. When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough. “The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt. The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door. Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.

Claudette Colvin was an unwed pregnant teen when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in 1955. Rosa Parks was a married, respectable officer of the NAACP when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Pauli Murray was a masculine-performing queer Black woman when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. Every kind of Black woman has a stake in the proverbial “bus.

Most people in America, if not the world, would agree that every advance involves some sacrifice. In fact, a common sports adage proclaims: "No pain, no gain." In other words, progress is always accompanied by a certain amount of loss. This concept is illustrated throughout history, literature and personal experience. One compelling illustration that some bad always accompanies some good is demonstrated in the Civil Rights movement. In 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white person. Although she was arrested and jailed, her brave efforts inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott which

One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, who worked as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger in Jim Crow–era Alabama.