December first is Rosa Parks Day. — Yes, as a child I knew about Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit in the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama back in 1955. But I did not know she was not old and tired at that time.

“I was 42,” she said. “No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” She was already an established leader in the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama at the time, and helped organize the resulting Montgomery Bus Boycott, resulting in jail and losing her job.

Later, living up north in Detroit, her involvement was invaluable as an active member of several civil rights organizations there. She countered racial injustice in schools, policing, jobs, and housing in the U.S. She “spent a lifetime challenging systemic inequality throughout the United States,”*

* – Women’s History Museum, Washington, DC.