The image of meek little Rosa Parks, too tired to get up from her seat to allow an able-bodied white man to sit in it, was a masterful piece of imagemaking by the NAACP, bringing attention to an intolerable condition of society in a way that pricked the consciences of the nation. Mrs. Parks was little, and she refused to give up her seat. But she had been challenging the Jim Crow laws for many, many years. "Meek" does not describe Rosa Parks, but she was pleased to project the image in order to help an organization to which she had belonged since 1943 to achieve one of the aims of desegregation.
Rosa Parks worked for a living, but she was not just a humble laborer. She was a graduate of the segregated Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, described as a second-class institution, which it was in resources and facilities, but which taught a rigorous curriculum that emphasized self-sufficiency as the key to survival in a segregated society. She then attended the all-black Alabama State College. She began her involvement as a vocal and active civil rights worker in the 1930s. She and her husband Raymond worked on the Scottsboro Boys case.
The following quotes are taken from the short bio of Rosa Parks at africanaonline.com:
In 1943, when Rosa Rosa Parks actually joined the NAACP, her involvement with the organization became even greater. She worked with the organization's state president, Edgar Daniel Nixon, to mobilize a voter registration drive in Montgomery. That same year, Rosa Parks was elected secretary of the Montgomery branch.
Emphasis mine.
An officer in one of the NAACP's most active chapters, and a close associate of the president of the Alabama NAACP, who was arguably the most powerful black man in Montgomery, AL. This is not the profile of an everywoman who happened to be on the right bus at the right time.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks took her seat in the front of the “colored section†of a Montgomery bus. The driver asked Rosa Parks and three other black riders to relinquish their seats to whites, but Rosa Parks refused (the others complied). The driver called the police, and Rosa Parks was arrested. She was released later that night after Nixon and the Durrs posted a $100 bond.
Although three black women had been arrested earlier that year for similar acts of defiance, and Rosa Parks herself had been thrown off a bus by the same driver 12 years before, this time the opponents of segregation were prepared to mount a counterattack. The Montgomery chapter of the NAACP had been looking for a test case to challenge the legality of segregated bus seating and to woo public opinion with a series of protests.
Emphasis mine.
The date was the only thing accidental about Mrs. Parks's action. She had acted deliberately, courageously and repeatedly over a period of years in opposition to numerous acts of racial discrimination, and to the bus seating policies in particular. Her act was not impulsive.
We like the romantic story of the petite lady in the cloth coat and the glasses looking up in innocence and fatigue at an overbearing white bus driver, like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. There is more steel to this story than that. Rosa Parks was innocent because the law she opposed was wrong, but she was aware and prepared. Rosa Parks was tired, but work was not the only thing she was tired of, and she had been tired of it since the 1930s and before.
We like to think that the white people of America were suddenly overcome by the epiphany of what kind of unfairness segregation was. We forget the relentless, dangerous and difficult efforts made to prepare that ground, so that when the seed of tolerance finally took root, it had a fertile place to grow: efforts made by Rosa and Ray Parks, and by hundreds of brave anonymous people like them.