Book Focus

Rosa Parks, Revisited

You’ve heard the story about Rosa Parks, of course. She was too tired to stand up one day in 1955, and her refusal to move to the back of the bus sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and Civil Rights Movement in America. But here’s the truth, as Herbert Kohl asserts in She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (The New Press): Rosa Parks wasn’t just a tired old woman, acting spontaneously, on her own. As Kohl details with gripping evidence, Parks actually was part of a community of organized and risk-taking activists. And that’s an important lesson for teachers and students to learn, says Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, in the book’s introduction. “Courageous leaders like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere, and they weren’t superhuman with magical powers,” she writes. “Teaching children this lesson reinforces the idea that they can make a difference too.” The book also aims to help teachers with a list of classroom resources and a guide to evaluating textbooks that discuss this period in American history.