Why did Parks’s actions spark the boycott when a similar action by Colvin did not? Several answers can be given, based upon their differences in age, deportment, reputation and demeanor. According to James Farmer, founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, what set Parks apart was that she had an almost “biblical quality.” “There was,” he recalled, “a strange religious glow about Rosa — a kind of humming Christian light.”

Shortly after 5 p.m., on a cool Alabama evening 60 years ago Tuesday [December 1], a 42-year-old woman clocked out from her job as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair Department Store. Rosa Parks walked westward along Montgomery Street to Court Square to board the Cleveland Avenue bus to make the five-mile, 15-minute trek back to her apartment at Cleveland Courts to cook supper for her husband, Raymond.

Encountering a standing-room-only bus and having been on her feet all day operating a huge steam press, Parks decided to cross the street and do some Christmas shopping at Lee’s Cut Rate Drug while waiting for a less crowded bus. Around 6 p.m., as she boarded bus number 2857 at the corner of Montgomery and Moulton streets, Parks was about to change the course of the 20th century.

Here are five myths about what happened that first evening of December in 1955.

1. Rosa Parks sat in the whites-only section of the bus.

Montgomery municipal buses each had 36 seats. The first 10 were reserved for whites only. The last 10 seats were theoretically reserved for blacks. The middle 16 seats were first-come-first-serve, with the bus driver retaining the authority to rearrange seats so that whites could be given priority.

Parks was sitting in an aisle seat on the front row of this middle section. To her left, across the aisle, were two black women. To her right, in the window seat, was a black man.

2. If Rosa Parks had not moved, a white passenger would not have had a place to sit.

A few minutes later, when the bus reached the third stop in front of the Empire Theater, several white passengers boarded, and driver James E. Blake (1912–2002) noticed a white man standing near the front. He called out for the four black passengers in Parks’s row to move to the back, where they would have to stand, as all of the seats were now taken.

They did not respond. Blake got out of his seat and instructed the four to move, saying, “Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats.” Three of the black passengers reluctantly proceeded to go and stand in the back of the bus. Parks, however, refused to get up, sliding from the aisle seat to the window seat, which would have allowed for the white passenger to sit in any of the three seats in her row.

The bus driver asked: “Are you going to stand up?” Parks looked him in the eye and responded with a quiet but resolute, “No.” She explained that she had gotten on board first, that she paid the same fare and that she wasn’t sitting in the white section.

She didn’t think it was fair that she had to stand for someone else to sit who arrived after her and that she was not violating the city ordinance. (She didn’t complain how nonchivalrous it was that a supposed gentleman would make a woman stand so he could sit, or how irrational it was that he wouldn’t even want to sit in the same row with her.)

“Well,” Blake responded, “I’m going to have you arrested.” Parks gave him the permission he did not request: “You may do that.”

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