I Have Learned Over The Years

This reflection appears in Parks's memoir Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope, and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation (1994). Parks described how her decision on December 1, 1955 — to refuse to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus — was not a spontaneous act of exhaustion but a deliberate moral choice. She had been trained in civil rights activism at the Highlander Folk School and had long prepared herself to resist segregation when the moment came.