In early 2024, a claim emerged online suggesting that civil rights activist Rosa Parks' husband, Raymond Parks, had a car. The origin of this rumor remains unclear, but it was repeated by American podcaster and rapper Joe Budden in June 2024. Clips of his claim have spread widely, with a TikTok video garnering about 10.5 million views and over 1 million likes as of now. Here's what Budden and his co-host, Trevor “Queenzflip” Robinson, said:

What Budden and Robinson Claimed

BUDDEN: The internet has been in an uproar since discovering that Rosa Parks’ husband had a car.ROBINSON: Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Rosa Parks is a plant?Many commenters believed this rumor discredited Parks, who was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. This led to the 13-month Montgomery bus boycotts against racial segregation on public transit. One Threads user wrote, “Rosa Parks’ husband had a car and she took the bus just to be messy.”Social media posts spreading the claim sometimes included a picture of Rosa and Raymond Parks standing in front of a white car. However, this car was not owned by Raymond Parks. It was actually owned by Rosa Parks, who bought it in 1968, more than a decade after the boycotts.The Library of Congress, which has comprehensive records of documents related to Rosa Parks, has a copy of Parks’ vehicle registration and a receipt of sale for the two-door 1965 Ford dated April 25, 1968, from Detroit, where she lived at the time. According to Jeanne Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and author of “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” the Parks family did not have a car until then. Theoharis also said that Montgomery segregationists spread rumors during the boycotts that Rosa Parks had a car.When asked by email 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.”Snopes has requested vehicle registration and title records from the Alabama Department of Revenue and the Michigan Department of State for Raymond and Rosa Parks. We will update this story once those records are available.

Was Rosa Parks' Protest Planned?

Posts claiming Raymond Parks had a car often drew comments defending the legitimacy of Rosa Parks’ protest. Some insisted that it didn't matter whether she had access to a car because she organized the civil disobedience in advance as a civil rights activist. One user commented on the TikTok clip of Budden, “So was I the only one that learned in History class that it was planned?” Another commenter on Threads said, “She was an activist working with a team of lawyers. It was a planned protest to bring the case to the courts.”The truth is more complicated. Parks, sitting between the “colored only” and “white only” sections, was not just a tired woman with achy feet. At the time of her protest, she led the youth division of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP 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, Theoharis said that Parks did not plan her protest with the NAACP or any other organizations ahead of time, 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, who refused to give up her seat eight months before Parks.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 August 28, 1955, several months before her protest.To coincide with Parks’ trial on December 5, 1955, the Black women's group called 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.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.