Rosa Parks: My Story

Front Cover
Dial Books, 1992 - Juvenile Nonfiction - 192 pages
"Even those familiar with her name will realize on reading this engrossing account how little they really know of Parks's life and the events that surrounded the dawning Civil Rights movement. Setting her historic refusal to give up her seat on a bus in the context of a life that began in 1913 in rural Alabama dramatizes the fact that her action came at a time and place that gave it the force to challenge the rigors of a lopsided system of justice. Few will be unmoved by the tactics employed by whites to disrupt the subsequent boycott; at the center, always, is Parks's dignified, calm recounting of outrages against her and other women and men, giving her words weight and impact as no raw fury could. Like sitting at the knee of an elder with much to tell, reading her story leads to ever more questions ('What was it really like then?') and shock that such injustices not only existed in the recent past but still linger." - Kirkus Reviews

From inside the book

Contents

How It All Started
1
Not Just Another Little Girl
22
3
38
Copyright

9 other sections not shown

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (1992)

Civil rights activist Rosa Parks was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. She attended the Montgomery Industrial School, which emphasized domestic sciences such as cooking, sewing, and caring for the sick. She married Raymond Parks in 1932 and was one of the first women to join the Montgomery branch of the NAACP in 1943. On December 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man and was arrested and fined for violating a city ordinance. Her actions inspired 50,000 blacks in Montgomery to boycott the city buses for a year until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the segregated busing policy was unconstitutional. She moved to Detroit, Michigan with her husband in 1957 and served as a secretary/ receptionist for U.S. Representative John Conyers from 1965 to 1988. She founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development, which sponsors an annual summer bus trip around the country for teenagers to learn the history of their country and the civil rights movement. She received numerous awards during her lifetime including the NAACP's Springarn Medal in 1979, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. She died on October 24, 2005 at the age of 92.