Rosa Parks Quotes
200 Rosa Parks Quotes
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It seems [sometimes] like we still have a long way to go.
Rosa Parks
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.
Rosa Parks
On evening in early December 1955 I was sitting in the front seat of the colored section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The white people were sitting in the white section. More white people got on, and they filled up all the seats in the white section. When that happened, we black people were supposed to give up our seats to the Whites. But I didn’t move. The white driver said, ‘Let me have those front seats.’ I didn’t get up. I was tired of giving in to white people. ‘I’m going to have you arrested,’ the driver said. ‘You may do that.’ I answered. Two white policemen came. I asked one of them, ‘Why do you all push me around?’ He answered, ‘I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.’
Rosa Parks
For half of my life there were laws and customs in the South that kept African Americans segregated from Caucasians and allowed white people to treat black people without any respect. I never thought this was fair, and from the time I was a child, I tried to protest against disrespectful treatment.
Rosa Parks
It was very hard to do anything about segregation and racism when white people had the power of the law behind them. Somehow we had to change the laws.
Rosa Parks
I was a regular person, just as good as anybody else. There had been a few times in my life when I had been treated by white people like a regular person, so I knew what that felt like. It was time other white people started treating me that way.
Rosa Parks
One of my earliest memories of childhood is hearing my family talk about the remarkable time that a white man treated me like a regular little girl, not a little black girl. It was right after World War I, around 1919. I was five or six years old.
Rosa Parks
Old Mose Hudson was very uncomfortable about the way the Yankee soldier treated me. [Just like any normal little girl.] Grandfather said he saw old Mose Hudson’s face turn red as a coal of fire. Grandfather laughed and laughed.
Rosa Parks
[My father] He was a carpenter and a builder, very skilled at brick and stonemasonary. He travelled around building houses.
Rosa Parks
[On parents moving to Tuskegee] After they [My parents] were married, they moved to Tuskegee, Alabama, to live. It was the home of Tuskegee Institute, which Mr. Booker T. Washington had founded back in 1881 as a school for blacks. My parents lived not far from it. Both black and white leaders called the town of Tuskegee a model of good race relations, and that may have been why my father wanted to move there.
Rosa Parks
My mother was around twenty-five years old by the time I was born, but she always said she was unprepared to be a mother. I guess she was unhappy because my father worked on building homes in different places around the country and she was left alone quite a bit.
Rosa Parks
[Her mother] She had to quit teaching until after I was born, and she always talked about how unhappy she was, being an expectant mother and not knowing many people. At that time women who were pregnant didn’t get out and move around and socialize like they do now. They stayed pretty much to themselves. She said she spent a lot of time crying…
Rosa Parks
[Her mother] Wondering… how she was going to get along, because she wasn’t used to having a child to take care of.
Rosa Parks
[At Tuskegee] I have pictures of the houses my father and my uncle built – beautiful houses. They learned from their father, I think.
Rosa Parks
Tuskegee was still the best place in Alabama for African Americans to get an education and my mother wanted to stay there. Her idea was for my father to take a job at Tuskegee Institute…. At that time black children in the South had very limited opportunities for schooling. But my father didn’t go along with that idea.
Rosa Parks
[On her father] He wanted to do contracting work and make more money. He and my mother didn’t agree on planning for the future.
Rosa Parks
My father decided he didn’t want to remain in Tuskegee. He wanted to go back to his family in Abbeville. My mother had no choice but to go with him.
Rosa Parks
My grandmother had started having children early and didn’t stop for a long time. When I was born, my father’s youngest brother, George Gains McCauley, was eight years old. [Rosa’s parents married when he was 24 years old.]
Rosa Parks
My father’s grandmother was a slave girl and part Indian or something. That’s all I know. If my mother knew more than that, she never told me. I guess she felt she wasn’t as compatible with that family as she should have been with her in-laws.
Rosa Parks
My father decided to go north, and my mother didn’t want to stay with his family while he was gone. She was pregnant with my brother by then, and she decided to go back to live with her own parents, who had a small farm in Pine Level. They were all alone by then.
Rosa Parks
My mother said she thought about the house in Abbeville with a father and mother and growing children, and then she thought about her own mother and father not having anybody with them. So she just up and left and went to stay with her parents.
Rosa Parks
[On getting her tonsils removed] He showed my mother how he could do the operation with me sitting in a chair, and with just a local anaesthetic, but she said No. She couldn’t stand that. So she went to Montgomery.
Rosa Parks
There wasn’t anything wrong with his [Her mothers’ sisters son Thomas] tonsils at all, or so he said years later when we talked about it. But because my mother and her sister could get both our tonsils removed for the price of one, they went ahead and had us both operated on.
Rosa Parks
[After having her tonsils removed] I was very sick after mine were removed. I couldn’t see, and my eyes swelled, and my throat didn’t heal up very quickly. We were in the hospital one or two nights.
Rosa Parks
I had no trouble with tonsillitis once my tonsils were removed, but that operation and all the days of school I missed caused me to be put into fifth grade instead of into sixth.
Rosa Parks
I had already completed fifth grade at Spring Hill School. But coming out of a rural school, they thought, I might be behind. I remember I was promoted into sixth grade at half term.
Rosa Parks
[On schooling at Miss White’s] I became a scholarship girl later, when it was difficult for Mother to pay the tuition. I would dust the desks, sweep the floor, empty the wastebaskets, and clean the blackboards if the lessons on them were not needed for the following day.
Rosa Parks
I remember when Mr Julius Rosenwald came to the school one time… Mr Rosenwald was president of Sears, Roebuck & Co., and he was a millionaire. He had a great interest in education, especially the education of black children in the South. Out in the rural areas he built one-room schoolhouses, and people called them Rosenwald schools.
Rosa Parks
I thought it was awful that they were condemned to die for a crime they did not commit. It demonstrated how little regard segregationists had for the lives of black people and the lengths they would go to, to keep us in fear.
Rosa Parks
[At that time] Whites accused anybody who was working for black people of being a Communist, but I don’t think anyone in Parks’ [Her future husband] group was a communist.
Rosa Parks
I was proud of Parks for working on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys. I also admired his courage. He could have been beaten or killed for what he was doing.
Rosa Parks
I came to understand that he was always interested in and willing to work for things that would improve life for his race, his family, and himself.
Rosa Parks
[On her husband proposing] One day he said, ‘I really think we ought to get married,’ and I agreed with him. The next day, when I was at church, he asked my mother’s permission to marry me, and when I came home from church she told me that she had agreed. He didn’t actually propose to me at all, or anyway not formally. That was in August of 1932.
Rosa Parks
We were married in December of 1932 in Pine Level, in my mother’s home. It was not a big wedding, just family and close friends. We didn’t even send out any invitations.
Rosa Parks
My husband was very supportive of my desire to finish school, and I went back to school after we were married. I received my high school diploma in 1933 when I was twenty years old. [At that time only a small percentage of black people in Montgomery went to high school.]
Rosa Parks
[On fighting for the right to vote] You had to call and find out. And then they might decide to have registration on a Wednesday morning from ten o’clock until noon, when they knew most black working people couldn’t get there. Even if you took off from work to be there, it didn’t mean you would get to register. If noon-time came, they would close the doors, no matter how many people were still standing in line. All this was to keep African Americans from being able to register.
Rosa Parks
[On requirements in order to register to vote] It used to be that you needed to own property, but by the time I tried to register, they said, ‘You should have property, but if you can pass the test by answering the questions correctly, you don’t have to own property.’ So you either had to own property or pass the test.
Rosa Parks
The first day in 1943 that was selected for registration [in order to vote] was a working day for me, so I couldn’t go.
Rosa Parks
[On voting registration certificates] Certificates were mailed to African Americans, while Caucasians received them immediately after completing the test.
Rosa Parks
I went down to register and take my test, but I did not receive a [voting registration] certificate in the mail.
Rosa Parks
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