The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

This brilliant, best-selling book turned award-winning documentary is so fantastic for unraveling a revisionist history of the “tired old lady who wouldn’t move to the back of the bus.”

Not unlike the way I show how Dr. King’s memory has been sanitized and defanged, Theoharis shows how Parks’ memory has been voided of her long history of radical activism, and her unyielding pursuit of racial and social justice.

I thought about this book a lot as I was writing my chapter on the hidden Black women, the “sheroes” of the Civil Rights Movement who present-day Black feminist activists are resurrecting… show more.

Jeanne Theoharis’s work takes on the mainstream narrative of the civil rights movement by highlighting Rosa Parks’ long career as an activist and her commitment to racial equality. Her scholarship provides a window into Parks’ interior life, providing greater depth to a historical figure whose contribution is often reduced to a single act—refusing to give up her seat on a bus. The book offers a nuanced and well-rounded perspective on Black women’s lives. I strive to do the same in my own work.

This brilliant biography completely explodes the myth of Rosa Parks as a tired old seamstress who simply chose not to get up in a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. More than a decade earlier, Parks led protests against white men’s gang rape of a black woman, Mrs. Recy Taylor, demanding the prosecution of those responsible for the brutal crime. Parks was an elected officer in the local NAACP and had attended a program at the labor and radical organizing center, the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, to train in nonviolent civil disobedience before she launched her protest on… show more.