seats where the Negro passengers, uh, take as they—on this route. The driver noted that the front of the bus was filled
with white passengers, and there would be two or three men standing.
He looked back and...demanded the seats that we were occupying. The other passengers very reluctantly gave up their
seats. But I refused to do so...The driver said that if I refused to leave the seat, he would have to call the police. And I
told him, “Just call the police.”Then the radio interviewer asked her the million-dollar question:
“What in the world ever made you decide to be the person who after all these years of Jim Crowe and segregation, what
made you at that particular moment decide you were going to keep that seat?”She replied very simply,
“I felt that I was not being treated right and that I had a right to retain the seat that I had taken as a passenger on that
bus.”He pressed her again noting that she had been mistreated for years, and wanted
to know what made her decide in that moment—and in the interview, she paused for a
second and then said:
“The time had just come that I had been pushed as far as I stand to be pushed, I suppose.”He asked her if she planned it—and she said,
“No.”He asked her if it just sort of happened. She agreed that it “just sort of
happened.”
This is a critical detail: Rosa Parks didn’t hesitate or think it through. It happened so
fast, she just listened to her instincts telling her “I was not being treated right,” and she
pushed herself to follow them.
Since she didn’t hesitate, there was no time to talk herself out of it.
Coincidentally, four days later, in that same city of Montgomery, Alabama, on
December 5, 1955, there was another five-second decision that changed history.