The Only Tired I Was Was

This line appears in Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), the autobiography she co-wrote with journalist Jim Haskins. Parks addressed the persistent myth that she refused to give up her seat because she was physically tired after a long day's work. She clarified that she was not unusually tired in body, but was tired — in the deepest sense — of yielding to a system of humiliation she had endured her entire life. It is among the most precise and widely quoted corrections of a historical misconception.