"She made us see and agree that everyone should be free." – Bill Clinton at Rosa Parks's funeral on November 2, 2005

Sometimes when important things happen, it takes a while for history to get the story right. For 50 years now, people have said that Rosa Parks was a poor seamstress who was too tired to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. They even said it in the movie Barbershop. But that isn’t the whole story. The facts are very different. Rosa Parks was tired. She was tired of living in a world where the white people told the black people where they could go and what they could do. She was tired of segregation. She wanted it to help end it.

Rosa Parks was an activist. She was the first woman to join the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She attended workshops at a place called the Highland Institute in Tennessee. At the time, the institute was dedicated to ending all segregation. Here are some pictures of Parks attending classes there.

The real story is that Rosa Parks grew up in a world where she always had to fight against racism, and that's exactly what she was doing when she calmly told the bus driver that he was going to have to call a police officer to arrest her, because she wasn't going to be moved. That's more like the truth of what happened, but it can never hurt to read more about Rosa Parks yourself, because the whole story is much more inspiring, even if it is harder to tell. Read more about Parks at the African American Registry and Africana Online.