Rosa Parks Quotes

200 Rosa Parks Quotes

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[On being rejected for voting registration on the second time she applied.] I was denied. They just told me, ‘You didn’t pass.’ They didn’t have to give you a reason. I thought I had passed the test, but I had no way of knowing. They could say you didn’t pass the test and there would be nothing you could do about it. The registrars could do whatever they wanted to do.
Rosa Parks

I was pretty sure I had passed the test [To register to vote.]. So, the third time I took the test, in 1945, I made a copy of my answers to those twenty-one questions. They didn’t have copy machines in those days. I copied them out by hand. I was going to keep that copy and use it to bring suit against the voter-registration board. But I received my certificate in the mail.
Rosa Parks

[On the next hurdle in being able to vote] The next thing I had to do was to pay my accumulated poll tax. The poll tax was $1.50 a year, and every registered voter had to pay it. But it was mostly black people who had to pay it retroactive. They didn’t deny the right to vote to whites…
Rosa Parks

If you were older and registered [to vote], you had to pay the poll tax back to the time you were twenty-one. I got registered in 1945 when I was thirty-two years old, so I had to pay $1.50 for each of the eleven years between the time I was twenty-one and the time I was twenty-two. At that time $16.50 was a considerable amount of money.
Rosa Parks

In the beginning there was no black lawyer in Montgomery I could call on. In fact, there were very few black lawyers practicing in Alabama at that time.
Rosa Parks

I remember going down to the polling place with Mr. Nixon and Attorney Madison. But that time I did get registered, so I didn’t have to bring a lawsuit.
Rosa Parks

I remember the first election for governor that I voted in. I voted for Jim Folsom, who was running against a very reactionary and very racist man named Handy Ellis. There were no unpleasant incidents, and I felt that I had gone through an awful lot of trouble to do something so simple and uneventful.
Rosa Parks

One of my main duties [As NAACP secretary] was to keep a record of cases of discrimination or unfair treatment or acts of violence against black people. There were many, many cases to keep records on.
Rosa Parks

[On a black man being frightened and not wanting to give a statement to Rosa Parks on a murder he had witnessed.] So I said, ‘Don’t be too hard on him.’ It was very difficult. People didn’t have any inclination to give up their lives just to try to bring a charge against somebody else.
Rosa Parks

To file a suit on behalf of a lot of people – what they call a class action – you have to have a plaintiff, someone who will represent the others. It took a lot of courage to be a plaintiff. You could be risking your life.
Rosa Parks



You can’t imagine the rejoicing among black people, and some white people, when the Supreme Court decision came down in May 1954.
Rosa Parks

[On the Highlander School] When I did get there, I found out that in the whole of Grundy County, Tennessee, there was not one black person other than those who came to the workshop and who stayed at Highlander. I didn’t have any contact to speak of with the white people outside the school, but I knew they weren’t at all happy about the school, because they had burned the building at the first opportunity they had.
Rosa Parks

When she complained about the rudeness of the bus drivers, they said that was a fact of life in Montgomery… Finally she managed to get the company to agree that the buses would stop at every corner in black neighborhoods, just as they did in the white neighborhoods. But this was a very small victory.
Rosa Parks

What galled her, and many more of us, was that blacks were over sixty-six percent of the riders. It was unfair to segregate us. But neither the bus company nor the may nor the city commissioners would listen.
Rosa Parks

I remember having discussions about how a boycott of the city buses would really hurt the bus company it its pocketbook. But I also remember asking a few people if they would be willing to stay off the buses to make things better for us, and them saying that they had too far to go to work. So it didn’t seem as if there would be much support for a boycott.
Rosa Parks

The best plaintiff would be a woman, because a woman would get more sympathy than a man. And the woman would have to be above reproach, have a good reputation, and have done nothing wrong but refuse to give up her seat.
Rosa Parks

In the spring of 1955 a teenage girl named Claudette Colvin and an elderly woman refused to give up their seats in the middle section of a bus to white people. When the driver went to get the police, the elderly woman got off the bus, but Claudette refused to leave, saying she had already paid her dime and had no reason to move. When the police came, they dragged her from the bus and arrested her.
Rosa Parks

After Claudette’s arrest, a group of activists took a petition to the bus company officials and the city officials. The petition asked for more courteous treatment and for no visible signs of segregation. They didn’t ask for the end of the segregation, just for an understanding that whites would start sitting at the front of the bus and blacks would start sitting at the back.
Rosa Parks

The driver looked back and noticed the man standing. Then he looked back at us. He said, ‘Let me have those front seats,’ because they were the front seats of the black section. Didn’t anybody move. We just sat right where we were, the four of us. Then he spoke a second time: ‘Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.’
Rosa Parks

I moved over to the window seat. I could not see how standing up was going to ‘make it light’ for me. The more we gave in and complied, the worse they treated us.
Rosa Parks



I thought back to the time when I used to sit up all night and didn’t sleep, and my grandfather would have his gun right by the fireplace, or if he had his one-horse wagon going anywhere, he always had his gun in the back of the wagon.
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

The driver of the bus saw me sitting there, and he asked was I going to stand up. I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m going to have you arrested.’ Then I said, ‘You may do that.’ These were the only words we said to each other.
Rosa Parks

I didn’t even know his name, which was James Blake, until we were in court together. He got out of the bus and stayed outside for a few minutes, waiting for the police.
Rosa Parks

As I sat there, I tried not to think about what might happen. I knew that anything was possible. I could be manhandled or beaten. I could be arrested.
Rosa Parks

People have asked me if it occurred to me then that I could be the test case the NAACP had been looking for. I did not think about that at all. In fact if I had let myself think too deeply about what might happen to me, I might have gotten off the bus. But I chose to remain.
Rosa Parks

Then I was introduced. I had asked did they want me to say anything. They said, ‘You have had enough and you have said enough and you don’t have to speak.’ So I didn’t speak. I enjoyed listening to the others and seeing the enthusiasm of the audience.
Rosa Parks

There were three demands: 1) Courteous treatment on buses; 2) First-come, first served seating, with whites in front and blacks in the back; 3) Hiring of black drivers for the black bus routes.
Rosa Parks

[Reverend Ralph Abernathy] He asked the audience to vote on these demands by standing if they wanted to continue the boycott and make the demands. People started getting up, one or two at a time at first, and then more and more, until every single person in the church was standing, and outside the crowd was cheering ‘Yes!’.
Rosa Parks

When the folks at Highlander tried to get me to move and live and work there just like Septima Poinsette Clark, Mama said no. She didn’t want ‘to be nowhere I don’t see nothing but white folks.’ So that ended that.
Rosa Parks



My mother and I were both listening [to the radio] and saying, ‘Well, there’s Reverend King’s enemy on the air.’ And right in the midst of this minister’s speech, the program was interrupted to say that Dr. King had been shot. It was very devastating.
Rosa Parks

By the time he was assassinated, I had come to realize that there were people who wished him [Martin Luther King Jr] harm. I was deeply grieved. Mama and I wept quietly together.
Rosa Parks

I took my mother out of the nursing home and cared for her at home until she died in 1979 at the age of ninety-one.
Rosa Parks

My health wasn’t too good at that time either, but I kept on working. I couldn’t do everything I wanted to do, but I did what I could.
Rosa Parks

One thing that I had long wanted to do was to start some kind of organization to help young people. In 1987 I founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, and I have been working very hard to raise money for that.
Rosa Parks

I envision the institute as a community-center environment that will offer programs for youth to help them continue their education and have hope for the future. That is a goal that has always been close to my heart. It was something that my husband also talked about many times, for he had not been able to get an education as a youngster.
Rosa Parks

I hope to give scholarships to deserving young people and to offer courses in communications skills, economic skills, political awareness, and health awareness that will help them realize their highest potential and provide the marketable skills that will enable them to be contributing, productive citizens. I would like them to have the same sense of hope, dignity, and pride that was instilled in me by my family and my teachers.
Rosa Parks

I am invested to speak or appear for many different organizations around the country. That happens quite a lot, even though it has now been more than thirty years since the Montgomery bus boycott.
Rosa Parks

The bus on which I was arrested back on December 1955 was part of the Cleveland Avenue Line. Today, Cleveland Avenue is named Rosa Parks Boulevard.
Rosa Parks

Dr King used to talk about the fact that if a law was changed, it might not change hearts but it would offer some protection. He was right.
Rosa Parks



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