Rosa Parks Quotes

My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest…I did a lot of walking in Montgomery.

The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.

The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell!

MLK, Jr. taught me how to say no to segregation, and I can hear him saying now... when you straighten up your back, no man can ride you. He said stand up straight and say no to racial discrimination.

Rosa Parks wasn't the first one to rebel against the segregated seats. I was the first one.

I came back to Louisville after the Olympics with my shiny gold medal. Went into a luncheonette where black folks couldn't eat. Thought I'd put them on the spot. I sat down and asked for a meal. The Olympic champion wearing his gold medal. They said, "We don't serve niggers here." I said, "That's okay, I don't eat 'em." But they put me out in the street. So I went down to the river, the Ohio River, and threw my gold medal in it.

It's not easy to be a martyr in the field of race relations.

I don't sign for white people.

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

When I went south in the 1960s, I knew I could die. If I went down there and did what I did up in Chicago and made all of those hatin' white folks laugh, then I would have been defeated.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.

Both morally and practically, segregation is to me a basic injustice. Since I believe it to be so, I must attempt to remove it. There are three ways in which one can deal with an injustice. (a) One can accept it without protest. (b) On can seek to avoid it. (c) One can resist the injustice non-violently. To accept it is to perpetuate it.

I wasn't thinking about history. I was thinking about how we were going to end segregation at lunch counters in Atlanta, Georgia.We would have never thought about making history, we just thought: Here is our chance to get out our sense of rejection at this kind of racial discrimination. I don't know that there was a time that anybody growing up in the South wasn't enraged about being segregated and being discriminated against.

When I first went to jail in 1960 with seven classmates trying to use their public library against the backdrop of my father being a veteran of World War II, not being able to use - having to sit behind Nazi on American military bases, I lost my fear of jails and death.

They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and that we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, ‘We ain’t going to let nobody turn us around.’

In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.

Rosa Parks' entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist.

In '42,' it's like the '40s where racial equality had come into the consciousness of a lot of people, whereas in the 1900s it was sort of a new thing.

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.

We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.

I had felt for a long time that, if I was ever told to get up so a white person could sit, that I would refuse to do so.

If I were a Negro, I'd be fighting, as Martin Luther King fought, for human recognition and justice. I'd rather go down with my flag flying. If you're weak or crippled, or you can't speak out or fight back in some way, then people don't hesitate to treat you badly.

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

We have to fight for what's right the same way the brothers and sisters that came before us did. The ultimate example, and there are many others, was The Stonewall Inn. They were pushed until they could take no more.