(Original illustration based on the archival photo of Rosa Parks in the bow pose.)
There is another image of Rosa Parks, far removed from the photographs most Americans know.
She is not seated on a Montgomery bus. She is not being fingerprinted after her arrest. She is not standing beside Martin Luther King Jr. or addressing a civil rights gathering. Instead, Rosa Parks is lying on a blanket, her knees bent and her hands reaching toward her feet, practicing Dhanurasana, the Bow Pose. The photo is part of an archived collection in the Library of Congress. The photograph dates from March 1973. Parks had just turned sixty.
It is a startling image only because this dimension of her life has remained largely outside the familiar story. Rosa Parks, one of the most revered figures of the American Civil Rights Movement, was also a longtime practitioner of Yoga. She attended classes, practiced with members of her family, demonstrated Yoga publicly and, according to historian Stephanie Y. Evans, even taught it.
Her practice reveals something important about a woman too often reduced to a single courageous moment. Parks’s life was not defined by one refusal on one bus. It was a lifetime of disciplined service—and, as we now know, that life also included a sustained concern for inner as well as outer well-being.
Beyond the Bus
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused an order to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest helped ignite the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a thirteen-month campaign that became one of the pivotal events of the emerging Civil Rights Movement.
The simplified version of the story sometimes portrays Parks as an exhausted seamstress who spontaneously decided she was too tired to move. In reality, she had already spent years working for racial justice. Her refusal arose from a life of conviction, discipline, and activism.
This chronology matters when considering her Yoga practice. There is no evidence that Yoga inspired Parks’s historic action in 1955. The available family accounts place her formal engagement with Yoga later, beginning sometime in the 1960s. Yoga did not create the Rosa Parks who refused to surrender her seat. Rather, it became part of the life of the woman who continued the struggle for decades afterward.
(Original illustration of Parks, evoking the era of newly integrated public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama, 1956.)
After moving to Detroit, Parks remained deeply active. She participated in the March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Selma-to-Montgomery March, and the Poor People’s Campaign. She worked for Congressman John Conyers from 1965 until 1988, supported anti-apartheid efforts, advocated for prisoners and young people, and remained engaged in movements for racial and social justice well into later life.
Somewhere within that extraordinarily demanding life, she made room for Yoga.
Yoga Becomes a Family Practice
Historian Stephanie Y. Evans, author of Black Women’s Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, uncovered this less familiar side of Parks while researching the ways Black women have written about health, contemplation, and self-care.
The clue came from Our Auntie Rosa, a family memoir by Parks’s niece Sheila McCauley Keys. The book describes Yoga as a family practice and recalls Parks accompanying her niece and nephew to Yoga classes beginning as early as the 1960s. That discovery led Evans into the Rosa Parks archives at the Library of Congress.
There she found photographic evidence. One striking photograph shows Parks practicing Dhanurasana on a simple blanket in March 1973, shortly after her sixtieth birthday. Evans’s research indicates that Parks was not merely attending classes: she was sharing Yoga publicly. Georgia State University reports that she gave public demonstrations in Detroit by 1973, and Evans has also written and spoken about Parks teaching Yoga.
The Library of Congress preserves something even more intimate: Parks’s own handwritten notes on Yoga, dated January 8, 1981. The papers sit in the archive alongside records of her political work, church life, correspondence, and civil-rights activities—a quiet reminder that Yoga belonged within the fabric of her everyday life.
Caring for the Body
The seeds of Parks’s attention to physical well-being appear to have been planted long before she encountered Yoga. In her autobiographical writing, Parks remembered her mother encouraging daily stretching and attention to health when she was a child. Evans sees this as part of a larger pattern in Parks’s life: caring for the body was not indulgence but a practical necessity.
That perspective is particularly meaningful when we remember the enormous strain under which Parks lived. The Montgomery Bus Boycott brought fame, but it also brought hardship. She and her husband lost employment, experienced financial difficulties, and received threats. After moving north, Parks continued a demanding public life rather than withdrawing into the security her iconic status might eventually have afforded her.
Evans places Parks within a broader history of Black women for whom practices of rest, exercise, meditation, and self-care helped make long-term service possible. In Evans’s memorable phrase, “self-care is part of resistance.” Her point is not that personal wellness can correct social injustice. Indeed, Evans explicitly warns that individual practices cannot substitute for changing unjust systems. Rather, those engaged in sustained work for others also need ways of replenishing their own physical and inner resources.
Seen in that light, the photographs of Parks practicing Yoga acquire another significance. Strength did not simply mean enduring without rest. Caring for oneself could help sustain one’s capacity to care for others.
A Christian Who Practiced Yoga
Yoga did not replace Rosa Parks’s Christian faith. Parks was a lifelong member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a denomination whose history reaches back to the struggle against slavery. At Saint Matthew A.M.E. Church in Detroit, she served as a stewardess and as a deaconess—the highest lay position available to a woman in the church. Her surviving papers include church bulletins filled with her handwritten sermon notes and prayers.
Yet her spiritual life was spacious enough to include practices from beyond Christianity. The Library of Congress records that in her senior years Parks continued taking Yoga classes and added Buddhist meditation to her prayers. She also became vegetarian and sought guidance from a naturopathic physician as part of her concern for health.
There is something quietly beautiful in that picture. Parks apparently felt no need to choose between her Christian devotion and contemplative or physical practices arising from other traditions. Yoga became part of a larger life devoted to faith, health, discipline, and service.
Passing It Forward
(Rosa Parks remained active for decades in education, advocacy and community life; original illustration.)
Perhaps the most revealing evidence of what Parks valued came in 1987, when she and her longtime friend Elaine Steele founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in Detroit. Its purpose was to educate and guide young people, combining civil-rights history with practical preparation for responsible adulthood.
According to Evans, physical development was intentionally included in the Institute’s youth programming. Participants encountered Yoga, karate, and other forms of exercise alongside civil-rights education, advocacy training, and life skills.
The woman who had practiced Yoga with her own family was now helping expose another generation to it.
Strength Within, Service Without
Yoga philosophy has always insisted that spiritual life cannot be confined to what happens on a mat. Practice ultimately asks how we live, how we meet difficulty, how we relate to others, and what we do with the strength we cultivate.
We should be careful not to impose Yoga philosophy retrospectively upon Rosa Parks’s civil-rights work or claim that her historic courage originated in Yoga. The evidence does not support that.
What the evidence gives us is subtler—and perhaps more inspiring. Here was a woman whose life demanded extraordinary perseverance. She marched, organized, served, prayed, worked, taught, advocated—and also stretched, practiced asana, meditated, and cared for her body. Inner cultivation and outward service existed side by side.
The famous Rosa Parks sat down once and helped a nation rise. The lesser-known Rosa Parks reminds us that the strength required to keep serving—for years and decades—also needs to be nourished from within. And that, too, is Yoga.
(Mira Devi)
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