Product Description

A brief biography of Rosa Parks, well-known for her role in the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama at the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2234036 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 47 pages

Customer Reviews

The story of the Mother of the Civil Rights Movement
In 1999 when Rosa Parks was honored with the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor for being the "Mother of the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement" I was surprised by the news because I thought she had received that honor years earlier. But it took forty-four years for Mrs. Parks to be honored for what she did on December 5, 1955 when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of civil disobedience triggered a black boycott of the city's bus system that lasted 381 days and the passage of laws that ended legalized segregation. You have to go back before the signing of the Declaration of Independence to find an act of defiance that is an important in American history and since the Congressional Gold Medal of Freedom was created there has not been a citizen who deserved it more than Rosa Parks.

Maryann N. Weidt's juvenile biography of "Rosa Parks" for the History Maker Bios series does a marvelous job of not only telling her story but of putting it in context. The assumption gleaned from most American history textbooks for grade schools would be that when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus it was the first time she had stood up for the rights of African Americans. But Weidt makes it clear that Parks had been a part of the fight for Civil Rights for over a decade at that time, having fought the state of Alabama for three years just to earn the right to vote. By the end of this informative juvenile biography young readers will understand why Rosa Parks is remembered as the mother of the Civil Rights Movement. They will also learn about not only the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s role in the boycott, but also about E. D. Nixon, who convinced Mrs. Parks to take her case to court, and Claudette Colvin, a teenager who had fought to keep her seat on a bus earlier that same year.

But the focus of the book is primarily on the life of Rosa Parks, how her grandfather set an example that she followed throughout her life, and the hardships she faced after the boycott ended that forced her and her husband to move north to Detroit. Eventually she would work for John Conyers, an African American congressman, for twenty-three years. Through her writings and her tireless support for the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks has been an inspiration to millions of Americans. When they finish reading Weidt's book, young readers will understand why as well.

While there are a few illustrations by Tim Parlin, the book is filled with historic black & white photographs, not only of Rosa Parks being fingerprinted after she was arrested, but also of the segregated buses of Montgomery and even a Coca Cola machine that was for "White customers only!" The back of the book contains a Timeline tracing the life of Rosa Parks, "A Tour of the Past" that can be taken at the Troy State University Montgomery Rosa Parks Library and Museum that opened in 2000, both nonfiction and fiction books for Further Reading, Websites, a Select Bibliography, and an Index.