I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. Parks herself kept refuting this version, writing in her biography, “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true.
On the one hand was the perception that she was an ordinary woman whose feet were tired that day in 1955 and who just spontaneously refused to give up her seat. Maybe this was because her role in the movement was both as a human and as a symbol, a woman remembered for one defiant act that could be read in different ways. Rosa Parks, who died yesterday, has been interpreted and reinterpreted over the years.
There’s probably no civil rights figure whose story was more clouded by myth.
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