Rosa Parks, an African American seamstress in 1955 Alabama, had no idea she was changing history when, work-weary, she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. Today, she is immortalized for the defiance that sent her to jail and triggered a bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr., into the national spotlight. Who was she, before and after her historic act, and how did that act sound the death knell for Jim Crow?
Historian Douglas Brinkley, whose "vigorous language" and "marvelous portraits" (Stephen Ambrose) have made him an acclaimed author and a media favorite, brings midcentury America alive in this brilliant examination of a celebrated heroine in the context of her life and tumultuous times. Here in Rosa Parks are the quiet dignity, hope, courage, and humor that have made this twentieth-century everywoman a living legend--an eye-opener of a book for students of history, politics, the black experience, and human nature.
Rosa Parks
Prologue
Chapter 1: Up from the Pine
Chapter 2: Coming of Age in Montgomery
Chapter 3: A Stirring Passion for Equality
Chapter 4: Laying a Foundations
Chapter 5: The Preparation
Chapter 6: The Bus Boycott
Chapter 7: Strength through Serenity
Chapter 8: "We Make the Road by Walking It"
Chapter 9: Steadfast and Unmovable
Chapter 10: Detroit Days
Chapter 11: Months of Bloody Sundays
Chapter 12: Onward
Epilogue
Bibliographical Notes
"[A] precise history of the woman and the incident that would crown her the mother of the civil rights movement." —USA Today
"A timely update of the historical record, told as an inspiring and unabashedly dramatic story of an American heroine." —The Seattle Times
