Black civil rights activist Rosa Parks is best known for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man on Dec. 1, 1955. Her subsequent arrest by law enforcement sparked the Montgomery bus boycotts, a 13-month protest in Alabama’s capital against racial segregation on public transit.
As such, some social media users expressed surprise at an online rumor that her husband, Raymond Parks, had a car.
Many online appeared to believe the claim discredited the activist.
It is unclear where the rumor originated, but it circulated widely after American podcaster and rapper Joe Budden repeated it in June 2024. One TikTok video of Budden making the claim had more than 1 million likes as of this writing.
In 2026, the claim recirculated on Threads, X and Facebook (screenshotted).
“I’m still not over Rosa Parks husband having a car,” several posts said.
Social media posts spreading the claim were sometimes accompanied by a picture of Rosa and Raymond Parks standing in front of a white car.
Rosa Parks and her husband standing in front of a car. (Library of Congress)
While the photo is legitimate and can be found in the Library of Congress’ archives, the car wasn’t owned by Raymond Parks. In fact, he never owned a car, and records show Rosa Parks didn’t buy a car until 1968, more than a decade after the boycotts, as we first reported in 2024.
The Library of Congress, which keeps comprehensive records of documents related to Rosa Parks, has a copy of Parks’ vehicle registration and a receipt of sale for a two-door 1965 Ford dated April 25, 1968, from Detroit, Michigan, where Parks lived at the time.
The Parks family didn’t have a car until then, according to Jeanne Theoharis, professor of political science at Brooklyn College and author of “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.” Theoharis said in a 2024 email to Snopes that Montgomery segregationists spread rumors at the time of the boycotts that Rosa Parks had a car.
When asked whether there was any chance Raymond Parks owned a vehicle during the boycotts, Theoharis told Snopes: “No. Not at all. Do you see how poor they were? Look at her income tax records.” In 2024, Snopes requested vehicle registration and title records from the Alabama Department of Revenue and the Michigan Department of State for Raymond and Rosa Parks. The Michigan Department of State did not have the records we requested, as the state only keeps records for 15 years. The Alabama Department of Revenue said it would not provide the records to out-of-state residents.
Rosa Parks did not plan the bus boycotts, but she helped maintain them
Posts claiming Raymond Parks had a car often drew comments defending the legitimacy of Rosa Parks’ protest by insisting it didn’t matter whether she had access to a car because she organized the civil disobedience in advance as part of her work as a civil rights activist.
“Yes, the Civil Rights Movement was led by very competent people. They didn’t just decide to do a bus boycott one day- they planned it out,” one popular
While the post above was largely factual, some important context was missing. Parks, who was sitting between the “colored only” and “white only” sections, was not simply a tired woman with achy feet who didn’t want to give up her seat, as the oft-repeated myth goes. In fact, at the time of her protest, Parks led the youth division of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, the country’s oldest civil rights organization, and was a respected, longtime activist trained in civil disobedience.
As Parks wrote in her autobiography, “Rosa Parks: My Story”:
I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was 42. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
However, she did not plan her protest with NAACP or any other organizations she was part of ahead of time, said Theoharis, even though the organization was looking for a “test case” to challenge the bus segregation laws in court after backing away from supporting 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, a mentee of Parks’ who refused to give up her seat eight months before Parks’ stand.
Parks explained her thoughts more in her autobiography:
As I sat there, I tried not to think about what might happen. I knew that anything was possible. I could be manhandled or beaten. I could be arrested. People have asked me if it occurred to me then that I could be the test case the NAACP had been looking for. I did not think about that at all. In fact if I had let myself think too deeply about what might happen to me, I might have gotten off the bus.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson told Vanity Fair in 1988 that Parks said she was motivated in the moment by the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till on Aug. 28, 1955, several months before Parks’ protest.
To coincide with Parks’ trial on Dec. 5, 1955, the Black women’s group the Women’s Political Council initiated a one-day, citywide bus boycott that was extended through a vote at Holt Street Baptist Church by Black leaders under the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association. Jo Ann Robinson, the council’s leader, did not coordinate with Parks to organize the boycott ahead of time, according to Page 45 of Robinson’s memoir:
I made some notes on the back of an envelope: “The Women’s Political Council will not wait for Mrs. Parks’s consent to call for a boycott of city buses. On Friday, December 2, 1955, the women of Montgomery will call for a boycott to take place on Monday, December 5.
However, once the boycott began, Parks helped maintain it, working as a dispatcher for an elaborate carpool system that helped people get around without taking the bus.
