Sixty-five years ago, a civil rights icon’s rise began with five paragraphs buried on the bottom of Page 9 of The Montgomery Advertiser: “Negro jailed here for ‘overlooking’ bus segregation.”
That day’s paper had no concept of the history it was covering with the Dec. 1, 1955, arrest of 42-year-old seamstress Rosa Louise McCauley Parks. Under Jim Crow laws, the Tuskegee native had been charged with “ignoring a bus driver who directed her to sit in the rear of the bus.”
The story that’s been told through the decades is that Parks didn’t move because she was physically tired. She later said that wasn’t the case. She was actually tired of being treated like that.