{"product_id":"the-rebellious-life-of-mrs-rosa-parks-10th-anniversary-edition-isbn-9780807020616","title":"The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (10th Anniversary Edition)","description":"\u003cb\u003e“Jeanne’s book not only inspired the documentary but has been a catalyst in changing our national understanding of Rosa Parks. Highly recommend!” —Soledad O’Brien, executive producer of the Peabody Award–winning documentary\u003ci\u003e The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe NAACP Image Award winning book that has helped redefine the public understanding of the civil rights icon—revealing her to be a radical and committed activist\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks\u003c\/i\u003e is the definitive political biography of Parks, examining her six decades of activism and challenging passive perceptions of her contributions in the civil rights movement.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIncluding a new introduction titled “Nine Ways to Be Like Rosa Parks in the Age of Black Lives Matter,” public historian Jeanne Theoharis provides vital insight into her life and activism. She not only reveals Parks’s personal, financial, and political struggles, but also highlights the danger of the “quiet seamstress” narrative, especially in an age where civil rights activism can be weaponized against those working for change.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePresenting a powerful corrective to the popular iconography of Rosa Parks, Theoharis excavates her political philosophy and six decades of activism. By detailing the political depth of a national heroine who dedicated her life to fighting inequality, Theoharis resurrects a civil rights movement radical who has been hidden in plain sight far too long, further showing how Parks and others helped pave the way for future activist organizations.INTRODUCTION TO THE 2025 EDITION\u003cbr\u003eTen Ways to Be Like Rosa Parks in the Age of Black Lives Matter\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eINTRODUCTION TO THE 2015 EDITION\u003cbr\u003e“Freedom Fighters Never Retire”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eINTRODUCTION\u003cbr\u003eNational Honor\/Public Mythology:\u003cbr\u003eThe Passing of Rosa Parks\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCHAPTER ONE\u003cbr\u003e“A Life History of Being Rebellious”:\u003cbr\u003eThe Early Years of Rosa McCauley Parks\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCHAPTER TWO\u003cbr\u003e“It Was Very Difficult to Keep Going When All Our Work Seemed to Be in Vain”:\u003cbr\u003eThe Civil Rights Movement before the Bus Boycott\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCHAPTER THREE\u003cbr\u003e“I Had Been Pushed As Far As I Could Stand to Be Pushed”:\u003cbr\u003eRosa Parks’s Bus Stand\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCHAPTER FOUR:\u003cbr\u003e“There Lived a Great People”:\u003cbr\u003eThe Montgomery Bus Boycott\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCHAPTER FIVE\u003cbr\u003e“It Is Fine to Be a Heroine but the Price Is High”:\u003cbr\u003eThe Suffering of Rosa Parks\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCHAPTER SIX\u003cbr\u003e“The Northern Promised Land That Wasn’t”:\u003cbr\u003eRosa Parks and the Black Freedom Struggle in Detroit\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCHAPTER SEVEN\u003cbr\u003e“Any Move to Show We Are Dissatisfied”:\u003cbr\u003eMrs. Parks in the Black Power Era\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCONCLUSION\u003cbr\u003e“Racism Is Still Alive”:\u003cbr\u003eNegotiating the Politics of Being a Symbol\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eACKNOWLEDGMENTS\u003cbr\u003eNOTES\u003cbr\u003eINDEX“The Rosa Parks in this book is as much Malcolm X as she is Martin Luther King Jr.”\u003cbr\u003e—Charles Blow, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Jeanne Theoharis gives us the gift of a fully human Rosa Parks, who studied, organized, loved, struggled, and stayed committed to freedom her entire life. This Rosa, the person not the myth, offers current organizers a tangible model for both engaging with and being part of our communities in authentic ways. This is a gift to movement building in our generation.”\u003cbr\u003e—Mariame Kaba, organizer and educator, Interrupting Criminalization\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Richly informative, calmly passionate and much needed.”\u003cbr\u003e—Nell Irvin Painter, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In the first sweeping history of Parks’s life, Theoharis shows us . . . [that] Parks not only sat down on the bus; she stood on the right side of justice for her entire life.”\u003cbr\u003e—Julian Bond, chairman emeritus, NAACP\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eThe Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks\u003c\/i\u003e will undoubtedly be hailed as one of the most important scholarly contributions to civil rights history ever written.”\u003cbr\u003e—Melissa Harris-Perry, former host, MSNBC’s \u003ci\u003eMelissa Harris-Perry\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Jeanne’s book not only inspired the documentary but has been a catalyst in changing our national understanding of Rosa Parks. Highly recommend!”\u003cbr\u003e—Soledad O’Brien, executive producer of the Peabody Award–winning documentary \u003ci\u003eThe Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eJeanne Theoharis\u003c\/b\u003e is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. She received an A.B. in Afro-American studies from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in American culture from the University of Michigan. She is the author or coauthor of six books and numerous articles on the black freedom struggle and the contemporary politics of race in the United StatesFrom the Introduction\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eNational Honor\/Public Mythology:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eThe Passing of Rosa Parks\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e On October 24, 2005, after nearly seventy years of activism, Rosa Parks  died in her home in Detroit at the age of 92. Within days of her death,  Rep. John Conyers Jr., who had employed Parks for twenty years in his  Detroit office, introduced a resolution to have her body lie in honor.  Less than two months after Hurricane Katrina and after years of partisan  rancor over the social justice issues most pressing to civil rights  activists like Parks, Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle  rushed to pay tribute to the “mother of the civil rights movement.”  Parks would become the first woman and 2nd African American to lie in  honor in the nation’s Capitol. “Awesome” was how Willis Edwards, a  longtime associate who helped organize the three-state tribute,  described the numbers of the people who pulled it together.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Parks’ body was first flown to Montgomery for a public viewing and  service attended by various dignitaries, including Condoleezza Rice who  affirmed that \"without Mrs. Parks, I probably would not be standing here  today as Secretary of State.\" Then her body was flown to Washington DC,  on a plane commanded by Lou Freeman, one of the first African American  chief pilots for a commercial airline. The plane circled Montgomery  twice in honor of Parks, with Freeman singing “We Shall Overcome” over  the loudspeaker.  “There wasn’t a dry eye in the plane,” recalled Parks’  longtime friend, Federal Sixth Circuit Judge, Damon Keith. Her coffin  was met in Washington DC by the National Guard and accompanied to its  place of honor at the Capitol Rotunda. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eForty thousand Americans  came to the Capitol to bear witness to her passing. President and Mrs.  Bush laid a wreath on her unadorned, cherry-wood coffin. “The Capitol  Rotunda is one of America's most powerful illustrations of the values of  freedom and equality upon which our republic was founded,” Senate  Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), resolution co-sponsor, explained to  reporters, “and allowing Mrs. Parks to lie in honor here is a testament  to the impact of her life on both our nation's history and future.”   Yet, Frist claimed Parks’ stand was “not an  intentional attempt to  change a nation, but a singular act aimed at restoring the dignity of  the individual.” Her body was next taken to the Metropolitan African  Methodist Episcopal Church for a public memorial to an overflowing  crowd.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Her casket was then shipped back to Detroit for another  public viewing at the Museum of African American History.  Thousands  waited in the rain to pay their respects to one of Detroit’s finest.   The 7-hour funeral celebration at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple  attracted 4000 mourners and a parade of speakers and singers from Bill  Clinton to Aretha Franklin.  In their tributes, Democratic presidential  hopefuls focused on Parks’ quietness:  Senator Barack Obama praised  Parks as a “small quiet woman whose name will be remembered” while  Senator Hilary Clinton spoke of the importance of “quiet Rosa Parks  moments.” As thousands more waited outside to see the dramatic  spectacle, a horse-drawn carriage carried Mrs. Parks' coffin to Woodlawn  Cemetery where she was buried next to her husband and mother.[iv] Six  weeks later, President Bush signed a bill ordering a permanent statue of  Parks placed in the U.S. Capitol, the first ever of an African  American, explaining, “By refusing to give in, Rosa Parks showed that  one candle can light the darkness. …Like so many institutionalized  evils, once the ugliness of these laws was held up to the light, they  could not stand…and as a result, the cruelty and humiliation of the Jim  Crow laws are now a thing of the past.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eParks’ passing presented  an opportunity to honor a civil rights legend and to foreground the  pivotal but not fully recognized work of movement women. Many sought to  commemorate her commitment to racial justice and pay tribute to her  courage and public service. Tens of thousands of Americans took off work  and journeyed long distances to Montgomery, DC, and Detroit to bear  witness to her life and pay their respects. Across the nation, people  erected alternate memorials to Mrs. Parks in homes, churches,  auditoriums and public spaces of their communities. The streets of  Detroit were packed with people who, denied a place in the church, still  wanted to honor her legacy.[vi] Awed by the numbers of people touched  by Parks’ passing, friends and colleagues saw this national honor as a  way to lift up the legacy of this great race woman. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Despite  those powerful visions and labors, the woman who emerged in the public  tribute bore only a fuzzy resemblance to Rosa Louise Parks.  Described  by the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e as the “accidental matriarch of the civil  rights movement,” the Rosa Parks who surfaced in the deluge of public  commentary was, in nearly every account, characterized as “quiet\".  “Humble,” “dignified” and “soft-spoken”, she was “not angry” and “never  raised her voice.”  Her public contribution as the “mother of the  movement” was repeatedly defined by one solitary act on the bus on a  long-ago December day. Held up as a national heroine but stripped of her  lifelong history of activism and anger at American injustice, the Parks  who emerged was a self-sacrificing mother figure for a nation who would  use her death for a ritual of national redemption. In this story, the  civil rights movement demonstrated the power and resiliency of American  democracy. Birthed from the act of a simple Montgomery seamstress, a  nonviolent struggle built by ordinary people had corrected the  aberration of Southern racism without overthrowing the government or  engaging in a bloody revolution.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This narrative of national  redemption entailed rewriting this history of the black freedom struggle  along with Parks’ own rich political history —disregarding her and  others’ work in Montgomery that had tilled the ground for decades for a  mass movement to flower following her 1955 bus stand.  It ignored her  forty years of political work in Detroit \u003ci\u003eafter \u003c\/i\u003ethe boycott, as  well as the substance of her political philosophy, a philosophy with  commonalties to Malcolm X, Queen Mother Moore, and Ella Baker, as well  as Martin Luther King.  The 2005 memorial celebrated Parks the  individual rather than a community coming together in struggle. Reduced  to one act of conscience made obvious, the long history of activism that  laid the groundwork for her decision, the immense risk of her bus  stand, and her labors over the 382-day boycott went largely unheralded,  the happy ending replayed over and over.   Her sacrifice and lifetime of  political service were largely backgrounded.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Buses were crucial  to the pageantry of the event and trailed her coffin around the  country.  Sixty Parks family members and dignitaries traveled from  Montgomery to DC aboard three Metro buses draped in black bunting. Once  in DC, a vintage bus also dressed in black followed the hearse, along  with other city buses, for a public memorial at the Metropolitan African  Methodist Episcopal Church. The procession to and from the Capitol  Rotunda included an empty vintage 1957 bus. The Henry Ford Museum in  Dearborn, Michigan offered free admission the day of her funeral so  visitors could see the actual bus “where it all began.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Parks’  body also served as important function—brought from Detroit to  Montgomery to Washington DC and then back to Detroit for everyone to  witness. Her body became necessary for these public rites, a sort of  public communion where Americans would visit her body and be sanctified.  This personal moment with Parks’ body became not simply a private  moment of grief and honor but also a public act of celebrating a nation  who would celebrate her. Having her body on view in the Capitol honored  Parks as a national dignitary while reminding mourners that their  experience was sponsored by the federal government. Look how far the  nation has come, the events tacitly announced, look at what a great  nation we are.  A woman who had been denied a seat on the bus fifty  years earlier was now lying in the Capitol.  Instead of using the  opportunity to illuminate and address current social inequity, the  public spectacle provided an opportunity for the nation to lay to rest a  national heroine \u003ci\u003eand\u003c\/i\u003e its own history of racism. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This  national honor for Rosa Parks served to obscure the present injustices  facing the nation. Less than two months after the shame of the federal  government’s inaction during Hurricane Katrina, the public memorial for  Parks provided a way to paper over those devastating images from New  Orleans.  Laying to rest the history of American racism was politically  useful and increasingly urgent.  Parks’ body brought national absolution  at a moment when government negligence and the economic and racial  inequities laid bare during Katrina threatened to disrupt the idea of a  colorblind America. Additionally, in the midst of a years-long war where  the Pentagon had forbidden the photographing of coffins returning from  Iraq, Parks’ coffin was to be the one that would be seen and honored.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Friends and colleagues noted the irony of such a misappropriation.   Many bemoaned the fact that some of the speakers at the memorials didn’t  really know Mrs. Parks, while many friends and longtime political  associates weren’t invited to participate.  Some refused to go or even  to watch, seeing this as an affront to the woman they had admired, while  others felt troubled but attended nevertheless.  Still others,  undeterred by the whitewashing, used the events to pay tribute to the  greatness of the woman they had known.  Regardless, they saw the nation  squandering the opportunity to re-commit itself to the task of social  justice that Parks had dedicated her life to. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe public  memorial promoted an inspirational fable: a long-suffering, gentle  heroine challenged backward Southern villainy with the help of a  faceless chorus of black boycotters and catapulted a courageous new  leader Martin Luther King, Jr. into national leadership. Mrs. Parks was  honored as midwife—not a leader or thinker— of a struggle that had long  run its course.  This fable is a romantic one, promoting the idea that  without any preparation (political or psychic) or subsequent work a  person can make great change with a single act, suffer no lasting  consequences, and one day be heralded as a hero.  Parks’ memorialization  promoted a children's story of social change so improbable—one  not-angry woman sat down and the country was galvanized— as to erase the  long history of collective action against racial injustice and the  widespread opposition to the black freedom movement, which for decades  treated Parks' extensive political activities as ‘un-American.’\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis  fable —of an accidental midwife without a larger politics —has made  Parks a household name, but trapped her in the elementary school  curriculum, rendering her uninteresting to many young adults.  The  variety of struggles that Parks took part in, the ongoing nature of the  campaign against racial injustice, the connections between Northern and  Southern racism that she recognized and the variety of Northern and  Southern movements in which she engaged, have been given short shrift in  her iconization. Parks’ act was separated from a community of people  who prepared the way for her action, expanded her stand into a movement,  and continued with her in the struggle for justice in the decades  subsequently.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e This limited view of Parks has extended to the  historical scholarship as well. Despite the wealth of children’s books  on Parks, Douglas Brinkley's pocket-sized biography \u003ci\u003eRosa Parks: A Life\u003c\/i\u003e and Parks' own young-adult-focused autobiography with Jim Haskins \u003ci\u003eRosa Parks: My Story\u003c\/i\u003e are the only, more detailed treatments of her life and politics.[x]  With scholarly treatments of Abraham Lincoln numbering over a hundred  and Martin Luther King in the dozens, the lack of a scholarly monograph  on Parks is notable. The trend among scholars in recent years has been  to de-center Parks in the story of the early civil rights movement,  focusing on the role of other activists in Montgomery; on other people  like Claudette Colvin who had also refused to give up their seats; and  on places other than Montgomery that helped give rise to the movement.   While this has provided a much more substantive account of the boycott  and the roots of the civil rights movement, Rosa Parks continues to be  hidden in plain sight. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e When I began this project, people often  stared at me blankly—another book on Rosa Parks? Surely there was  already a substantive biography. Others assumed that the mythology of  the simple, tired seamstress had long since been revealed and  repudiated. Many felt confident we already knew her story —\u003ci\u003eshe was the NAACP secretary who’d attended Highlander Folk School and hadn’t even been the first arrested for refusing to move\u003c\/i\u003e,  they quickly recited. Some even claimed that if she’d done such  significant things or supported other movements “don’t you think we  would know that already.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor my part, I had spent more than a  decade documenting the untold stories of the civil rights movement in  the North.  This work had sought to complicate many of the false  oppositions embedded in popular understandings of the movement: North  vs. South, civil rights vs. Black Power, nonviolence vs. self defense,  pre-1955 and post. When Rosa Parks died in 2005, I, like many others,  was captivated and then horrified by the national spectacle made of her  death.  I gave a talk on its caricature of her (and by extension the  mis-representation of the civil rights movement), decrying the funeral’s  homage to a post-racial America and its ill-fitting tribute to the  depth of Parks’ political work.  Asked to turn the talk into an article,  I felt humbled and chastened. Here in the story of perhaps the most  iconic heroine of the civil rights movement lay all the themes I had  written about for years.  And yet I kept bumping up against the gaps in  the histories of her.  It became clear how little we actually knew about  Rosa Parks. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e If we follow the actual Rosa Parks—see her decades  of community activism before the boycott; take notice of the  determination, terror, and loneliness of her bus stand and her steadfast  work during the year of the boycott; and see her political work  continue for decades following the boycott’s end—we encounter a much  diff erent “mother of the civil rights movement.” Th is book begins with  the development of Parks’s self-respect and fierce determination as a  young person, inculcated by her mother and grandparents; her schooling  at Miss White’s Montgomery Industrial School for Girls; and her marriage  to Raymond Parks, “the fi rst real activist I ever met.” It follows her  decades of political work before the boycott, as she and a small cadre  of activists pressed to document white brutality and legal malfeasance,  challenge segregation, and increase black voter registration, fi nding  little success but determined to press on. It demonstrates that her bus  arrest was part of a much longer history of bus resistance in the city  by a seasoned activist frustrated with the vehemence of white resistance  and the lack of a unifi ed black movement who well understood the cost  of such stands but “had been pushed as far as she could be pushed.” The  community’s reaction that followed astonished her. And thus chapter 4  shows how a 382-day boycott resulted from collective community action,  organization, and tenacity, as Parks and many other black Montgomerians  worked to create and maintain the bus protest for more than a year.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  second half of the book picks up Parks’s story aft er the boycott. It  shows the enduring cost of her bus stand for her and her family, and the  decade of death threats, red-baiting, economic insecurity, and health  issues that followed her arrest. Forced to leave Montgomery for Detroit,  her life in the North—“the promised land that wasn’t”—is a palpable  reminder that racial inequality was a national plague, not a Southern  malady. Parks’s activism did not end in the South nor did it stop with  the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights acts. And so the last  chapters of the book illustrate the interconnections between the civil  rights and Black Power movements, North and South, as Parks joined new  and old comrades to oppose Northern segregation, cultivate independent  black political power, impart black history, challenge police brutality  and government persecution, and oppose U.S. involvement in Vietnam.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne  of the greatest distortions of the Parks fable has been the ways it  missed her lifetime of progressive politics, a resolute political  sensibility that identified Malcolm X as her personal hero. The many  strands of black protest and radicalism ran through her life. Parks’  grandfather had been a follower of Marcus Garvey.  She’d gotten her  political start as a newlywed with her husband Raymond (‘the first real  activist I ever met’) as he worked to free the Scottsboro boys and spent  a decade with E.D. Nixon helping transform Montgomery’s NAACP into a  more activist chapter. She attended Highlander Folk School to figure out  how to build a local movement for desegregation and helped maintain  —not simply spark— the 382-day Montgomery bus boycott.  Forced to leave  Montgomery for Detroit, she spent more than half of her life fighting  racial injustice in the Jim Crow North. Parks’ longstanding political  commitments to self defense, black history, criminal justice,  independent black political power, and community empowerment intersected  with key aspects of the Black Power movement, and she took part in  numerous events in the late 1960s and 1970s.  Indeed, the scope of Mrs.  Parks’ political life embodies the breadth of the struggle for racial  justice in America over the 20th century. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Finding and hearing  Rosa Parks has not been easy. The idea of the ‘quiet’ Rosa Parks has  obscured  all that she had to say.  While there are literally endless  articles and interviews to find of her, most interviewers asked similar  questions.  They tended to see her without hearing her, without  listening for the political sensibility of the real actor behind the  idea of Rosa Parks.  Mrs. Parks talked slowly and measuredly, and  interviewers often missed what she was actually saying, impatiently  plowing ahead with the story they wanted to tell.[xi] The history of the  boycott, of what led up to it and what happened during it, has become  the stuff of legend—and numerous mistakes and misimpressions have been  canonized in the historical record, creating another set of blinders.  Moreover, as her friends and colleagues make amply clear, Mrs. Parks  never volunteered information that wasn’t directly asked for. She was a  political activist and a Southern lady—both of which called for the  judicious use of stories, the masking of unpleasant or unnecessary  details, and the tendency to background the individual to put forth the  interests of the group.  Her political activism was born in the  viciousness of 1930’s Jim Crow South and the anti-Communist hysteria  that attended it-- and this would indelibly shape how she obscured her  own political sensibility and activities.  While maintaining her  activism over decades, she remained circumspect about it. Finally, for  the second half of her life, Rosa Parks yearned for privacy and found  her fame hard to bear, yet she simultaneously believed in her  responsibility to continue telling the story of the movement as a way to  keep it going. Her ambivalence—wanting the history of black struggle to  be preserved but disliking the spotlight— meant she often sought to  endure the interviews, rather than use them to tell a different story. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThus,  identifying her frame of these events— her philosophy and narrative  voice— has required listening around the margins of those interviews to  excavate a more substantive account of what was happening and how she  saw it. She chose her words with care, and so, particularly in the  sections related to her bus stand and the boycott, I have stitched  together many, many quotes from dozens of interviews so that we might  hear her insights and understand the events as she saw them.  Combing  the black press and the archives for mentions of her activities,  documents, letters, and quotes, I have also interviewed many of her  friends, family, and political associates to round out this picture.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Unfortunately, many of Parks’ personal effects —dresses, awards, sewing  basket, and papers —have been caught in an extended legal dispute over  her estate between the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute, which she  co-founded with Elaine Steele, and her family. This led a Michigan  probate judge to give Guernsey’s Auction, a celebrity auction house in  New York City, the responsibility of selling all of it, with the profits  to be distributed between her Institute and family. Guernsey’s Auction  has been attempting to sell the Rosa Parks Archive for five years,  steadfastly unwilling to let any scholar make even a cursory  examination. The auction house prepared an inventory of materials, a  64-page list and companion sampling of interesting documents—a task that  would be unthinkable without a scholar to contextualize the  significance of the documents if Parks was considered a serious  political thinker like Thomas Jefferson or Martin Luther King.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The legacy of Rosa Parks over the past decade has been besieged by  controversies around profit, control, and the use of her image. This  treatment is at odds with how Parks lived and her commitment to the  preservation and dissemination of African American history. Parks had  donated the “first” installment of her papers to Wayne State University  in 1976. “I do hope that my contribution can be made use of,” she told a  Wayne student reporter.  Yet the vast trove of her papers, letters and  other ephemera sits in storage facility in Manhattan of use to no one,  priced at $6-10 million. Institutions such as Wayne State University,  Alabama State University and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg  Center for Research in Black Culture would be logical homes for Parks’s  papers but cannot compete in such an auction. And so Parks’s ideas and  life’s work sit idly in a New York warehouse, waiting to be purchased.  When that archive is finally opened to researchers, a far more nuanced  and detailed record of Parks’ political ties and perspectives will be  available, no doubt deepening and challenging aspects of this book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e All this provides certain challenges for a biographer. I have attempted  to find Rosa Parks rather than the Rashomon effect of her, to hear her  amidst the bells and whistles.  While I believe I have come to  understand some of her political sensibility and to contextualize its  roots and historical landscape, there is much still unknown. This is  fundamentally a political biography; it does not fully capture her  community of friends and family ties, her faith and church life, her  marriage, her daily activities.  That is an undertaking for others.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e What I have endeavored here is to begin the task of going behind the  icon of Rosa Parks to excavate and examine the scope of her political  life.  In the process, I have used her history to re-tell and reexamine  the span of the black freedom struggle, and to critique the many  mythologies that surround much of the popular history of the civil  rights movement.  Rosa Parks’ life is already employed to tell a story  of the United States.  And so what I do here is tell a different  story—showing the much broader truths about race in America, the  struggle for black freedom, and the nature of individual courage to be  gained from a fuller accounting of her life, a “life history of being  rebellious” as she put it.  It is a story with far greater lessons on  how we might work for social justice today.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A word on naming.  I  refer to Rosa Parks throughout the book both as Parks and Mrs. Parks.   Most people, even young schoolchildren, recognize ‘Rosa Parks.’ Using  Parks and Mrs. Parks — less familiar ways of naming her—signal the need  to look at her more carefully.  I predominantly use Parks (despite the  fact that this was what she and others called her husband) to follow the  custom of scholarly biographies to refer to the subject by her last  name.  But I interchange this with Mrs. Parks, a form of address that  whites routinely deprived many black women like Parks of, and the way  many people who respected her referred to her.   Using the honorific  also adds a degree of formality to mark that she is not fully ours as a  nation to appropriate.  And through the title’s juxtaposition of “Mrs.  Rosa Parks” and “rebellious” I hope to get at the complex and  significant ways she moved through the world.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It is a rare  gift as a scholar to get to deconstruct the popular narrative and  demythologize an historical figure, and, in the process, discover a more  impressive and substantive person underneath.  I have been greatly  fortunate in this task.  Rosa Parks’ political history spans most of the  20th century, providing an exceptional glimpse into the scope and  steadfastness of the struggle for racial justice in America over the  past century.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e","brand":"Beacon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233734537445,"sku":"NP9780807020616","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780807020616.jpg?v=1767741183","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-rebellious-life-of-mrs-rosa-parks-10th-anniversary-edition-isbn-9780807020616","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}