Rosa Parks (Penguin Lives Biographies) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Rosa Parks (Penguin Lives Biographies) Book

Most Americans know her only as the 42-year-old seamstress who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Her quiet act of defiance is often considered the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, but historian Douglas Brinkley reminds us that it was neither the beginning nor the end of Rosa Parks's quest for justice. On that fateful day in 1955 she was already a veteran civil rights activist, married to a charter member of the NAACP's Montgomery chapter, and a devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the many black churches whose congregants organized and fought to desegregate the South. Brinkley gives a thorough account of Parks's political life in the South and in Detroit (where she moved in 1957 to escape death threats), capturing her majestic personal dignity. Yet he also places her activism within a vivid historical context, anchored by extensive interviews with her peers and Parks herself as well as scholarly research. His subject is now a frail octogenarian, but Brinkley conveys the power of her legacy in a moving final scene when Nelson Mandela, just four months out of a South African jail in 1990, embraces Parks as a comrade and a beloved mentor. --Wendy Smith Read More

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  • Product Description

    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.

  • 0670891606
  • 9780670891603
  • Douglas G. Brinkley
  • 1 May 2000
  • Viking Books
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 256
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