I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move
Attributed toRosa Parks1913–2005 · American civil rights activist
≈Attribution status: The thought is demonstrably hers. This wording is not pinned to any publication.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
Parks spent the rest of her life correcting the idea that she stayed seated because her feet hurt, so a line about having decided in advance is exactly the point she kept making. But this particular sentence has no source: Wikiquote lists it on the talk page under “Unsourced,” and it does not appear in the full text of her papers at the Library of Congress. What is documented is a sharper sentence from her autobiography — “the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
“I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move” attributed to Rosa Parks (1913–2005); wording untraced to any primary source. Traced by Quotle.info.
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? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
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In context
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Provenance
Where the quote actually comes from
Attributed to
Rosa Parks
Primary source
None located for this wording
Wikiquote status
Listed under “Unsourced” on the talk page
Documented alternative
Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), cited by Wikiquote at p. 116
I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move.
No surrounding passage exists to quote, because no source text has been identified. The documented Parks sentence closest to it is: "People always said that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true... the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
Wikiquote puts this one on the talk page, not the article. It is listed under “Unsourced” on Talk:Rosa Parks ↗, among lines editors could not attach to a publication.
The documented version of the thought is better. Wikiquote’s sourced list ↗ carries “People always said that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true… the only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” which it cites to Rosa Parks: My Story, p. 116 (Parks and James Haskins, 1992). We are reporting Wikiquote’s citation here; the book itself was not readable from this session.
Her papers do not contain the phrase. A full-text search of the Rosa Parks Papers ↗ for “made up my mind not to move” returns nothing — a signal, though the digitised collection is partial and handwriting OCR is imperfect.
No specialist has traced it. Quote Investigator, which this site defers to wherever it has investigated a line, has no article on this one, so there is no earlier attestation on record to adopt.
No source work has been identified for this wording, so no rights status can be asserted, and none of it is public domain. Parks died in 2005 and her writings and interviews remain in copyright to her estate and publishers; Rosa Parks: My Story (1992), the book that carries the documented alternative, is in copyright to Parks, James Haskins and Dial Books.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Context
Why the wording matters here
Parks was not a tired seamstress who happened to snap. She was a trained organiser and the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, and she objected for the rest of her life to the version of the story in which she simply had sore feet. A quotation about having made up her mind in advance therefore lands on exactly the right side of the argument.
Which is precisely why it is worth checking rather than repeating. The correction is well documented in her own book; this sentence is a paraphrase of it that has drifted loose from any source, and you do not need the loose one when the documented one is sharper.
The point is real and sourced. This particular sentence is neither.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1913–2005 · American civil rights activist · Montgomery, Alabama
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was a seamstress and long-serving NAACP secretary in Montgomery, Alabama, whose refusal to give up her bus seat on 1 December 1955 set off the Montgomery bus boycott. Congress later called her the Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement, a title that has had the odd side effect of attracting inspirational sentences she never demonstrably wrote. She published an autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story, with James Haskins in 1992, and her papers are held at the Library of Congress.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Best available source
No primary source located for this wording. Listed among unsourced quotations on the talk page of the English Wikiquote article "Rosa Parks" (accessed 19 September 2026). Compare the documented statement in Rosa Parks with James Haskins, Rosa Parks: My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992), cited by Wikiquote at p. 116.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘I knew someone had to take the first step and I made up my mind not to move’?” Last verified 19 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/i-knew-someone-had-to-take-the-first-step-and-i-made-up-my/