All I was doing was trying to get home from work. — Rosa Parks

All I was doing was trying to get home from work.

Author: Rosa Parks

Insight: There's something almost unbearable about the simplicity of what Rosa Parks said. She wasn't declaring herself a revolutionary or preparing for a grand moral stand. She was tired from her job and wanted to go home—the most ordinary human desire imaginable. And yet that ordinary desire, denied to her simply because of her race, became the moment that cracked open segregation itself. What makes this so piercing is how it strips away the mythmaking we sometimes do around change. We imagine activists as people who wake up ready to fight, when often they're just people going about their lives who refuse to accept being treated as less than human. Parks wasn't extraordinary in her ambition; she was extraordinary in her refusal to accept the extraordinary injustice of her situation as normal. It's a useful mirror for us today. When we witness unfairness—whether it's a policy that doesn't affect us personally but feels wrong, or a social norm we're expected to accept without question—we can ask ourselves: am I accepting this as inevitable, or am I willing to say no, just like someone going home from work? The most powerful changes often don't require heroic gestures. They require ordinary people deciding that something ordinary is unacceptable.

Source: Mrs. Rosa Parks Reports on Montgomery Alabama Bus Protest, Highlander Folk School, 1956