Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks is mainly known for her role in the Montgomery Bus boycott and is deemed as the “first lady of civil rights.” She was a social justice activist and a prime initiate of the civil right movement.
Reading Materials
Rosa Parks: A Biography (Greenwood Biographies)
Summary: This book captures the story of this remarkable woman like no other biography of her before it. It examines the entire scope of Rosa Parks’s life, from her birth in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama to her 1943 enrollment in the Montgomery NAACP to the dramatic events of the 1960s, and her continuing work up to her death in 2005. Each chapter provides an exploration of a period in Parks’s life, portraying the people, places, and events that shaped and were shaped by her. Readers will see in Parks, not an inadvertent tripwire of history, but a woman whose lifelong struggle against racism led her inexorably to a moment where she took a courageous stand by sitting down and not moving.
The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow
Summary: A detailed look at the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, based on extensive interviews and exclusive documents.
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
Summary: The historic retelling of Rosa Parks and her courageous actions retold in a graphic novel format to help reach new audiences and expand through new mediums.
Rosa Parks (Journey to Freedom)
Summary: Examines the life and accomplishments of Rosa Parks, as well as her impact on the civil rights movement.
Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Summary: Contains primary source material, letters, interviews, trial testimony, reports of meetings, editorials, and articles in relation to the Montgomery Bus Boycott for further context.
Summary: Highlights the life of Rosa Parks, a civil rights leader known for her refusal to step to the back of the bus, sparking a boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
Summary: Historian Danielle L. McGuire uncovers the untold history of many black, female civil rights activists. McGuire’s book is meant to serve as a correction to popular accounts of the civil rights era. While the movement has frequently been associated with its male leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., McGuire argues that black women have always been at the forefront of anti-racist activism. Civil rights campaigns often targeted sexual violence, and McGuire argues that a central goal of the civil rights movement has always been the protection of black women’s bodily autonomy.
The Bus Ride That Changed History
Summary: Fifty years later, The Bus Ride That Changed History retraces that chain of events by introducing the civil rights movement one idea at a time. Take a ride through history with this unique retelling of what happened when one brave woman refuses to stand up so that a white passenger could sit down.