Rosa Parks is one of the most well-known Americans today, but much of what is known and taught about her is incomplete, distorted, and just plain wrong. Adapted from the original by Jeanne Theoharis and YA author Brandy Colbert, this young readers’ edition of the NAACP Image Award-winning The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks shatters the myths that Parks was meek, accidental, tired, or middle class. She reveals a lifelong freedom fighter whose activism began two decades before her historic stand that sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and continued for 40 years after. The book follows Parks to Detroit, where she spent the second half of her life, and reveals her activism alongside a growing Black Power movement and beyond. On Rosa Parks’ birthday, join Jeanne Theoharis for a timeless discussion of America’s most legendary and misunderstood activists.
Jeanne Theoharis is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College. She is the author or co-author of nine books and numerous articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements, the politics of race and education, social welfare, and civil rights in post-9/11 America. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, The Nation, The Atlantic, Slate, Salon, the Intercept, the Boston Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her books have received numerous awards, including the 2014 2014 NAACP Image Award, the Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians, and the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction.
Ages 12 and up
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