With a small group of other activists, including E.D. Indeed, one of the issues that animated her six decades of activism was the injustice of the criminal justice system - wrongful accusations against Black men, disregard for Black women who had been sexually assaulted, and police brutality. 4, 1913, she had been an activist for two decades before her bus stand - beginning with her work alongside Raymond Parks in 1931, whom she married the following year, to organize in defense of the “ Scottsboro Boys” (nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women). Parks reminded interviewers time and again.īorn Feb. It didn’t begin when I was arrested,” Mrs. “Over the years, I have been rebelling against second-class citizenship. It’s inevitable, respectable and not disruptive.īut that’s not who she was, and it’s not how change actually works. The boycott is seen as a natural outgrowth of her bus stand. In our collective understanding, she’s trapped in a single moment on a long-ago Montgomery bus, too often cast as meek, tired, quiet and middle class. Parks is narrow, distorted, or just plain wrong.

And yet much of what people learn about Mrs. and Rosa Parks dominate the Civil Rights Movement chapters of elementary and high school textbooks and Black History Month celebrations. Parks and about the civil rights movement. The confusion around the image reveals Americans’ overconfidence in what we think we know about Mrs. It was, in fact, taken when she was arrested in February 1956 after she and 88 other “boycott leaders” were indicted by the city in an attempt to end the boycott. 1, 1955, after she famously refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. Parks’s arrest in Montgomery, Ala., on Dec. Though it’s regularly misattributed as such, it is not the mug shot taken at the time of Mrs. But the photo, often seen in museums and textbooks and on T-shirts and websites, isn’t what it seems. 7053 is one of the most iconic images of Rosa Parks.

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