Rosa Parks by James Haskins

First published: 1992; illustrated

Subjects: Activists, education, politics and law, race and ethnicity, and social issues

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1913-1991

Recommended Ages: 13-15

Locale: Tuskegee, Pine Level, and Montgomery, Alabama; Hampton, Virginia; and Detroit, Michigan

Principal Personages:

• Rosa McCauley Parks, an impetuous black girl in the South who as an adult refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus to a white patron
• Raymond Parks, Rosa’s activist husband and supporter
• James McCauley, Rosa’s father, a carpenter and stonemason
• Leona Edwards McCauley, Rosa’s mother, a schoolteacher
• Sylvester McCauley, Rosa’s young brother
• Sylvester Edwards, Rosa’s maternal grandfather
• Rose Edwards, Rosa’s maternal grandmother
• James Percival, the Scotch-Irish father of Sylvester Edwards, Rosa’s maternal great-grandfather
• Mary Jane Nobles, the slave wife of James Percival, Rosa’s maternal great-grandmother
• Edgar Daniel Nixon, a Montgomery porter and activist
• Martin Luther King, Jr., a Montgomery pastor and the president of the Montgomery Improvement Association
• Ralph David Abernathy, a Montgomery pastor and activist

Form and Content

Rosa Parks: My Story traces the experiences of the author from her reminiscences of both childhood marvels and assaults in segregated Tuskegee and Pine Level, Alabama, to her position as a lauded activist in the office of Congressman John Conyers of Detroit, Michigan, and her subsequent retirement. The book is largely episodic, and each of the twelve chapters explores an aspect of Rosa Parks’s sense of cultural isolation and disparagement in a emotional topography in which terror was the norm among African Americans. The first-person narration relates Parks’s view of a “separate and unequal” South disinclined to treat black people with respect. The story gains its expansiveness from the author’s lively recollection of happenstances and individuals whose lives intersected with hers. The book’s most moving episodes are Parks’s bus stand, described in “You’re Under Arrest” and “They’ve Messed with the Wrong One Now,” and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in the chapter “Stride Toward Freedom,” in which the relentless Old Guard citizenry sparred with the Montgomery Improvement Association. Parks’s straightforward, emphatic narration is not only a recollection of one woman’s odyssey through Alabama’s legalized segregation but also a demonstration of success achieved through nonviolent action.

In Rosa Parks, the author provides photographs of herself and her family, as well as scenes of the seven handcuffed Scottsboro Boys, a black classroom, the “colored” section of a segregated bus, a “colored” water fountain in a local city park, a Ku Klux Klan rally, Edgar Daniel Nixon, president of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Martin Luther King, Jr., and Montgomery bus boycotters—all of which illustrate the existence of black people in mid-twentieth century Alabama. The photographs and scenes reinforce Parks’s crucial presence in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s.

Opening with the historic “tired of being pushed around” dialogue on December 1, 1955, between the author and the white male bus driver who made an attempt to execute a local law, Parks positions herself centerfront in a movement that led to the desegregation of public facilities in Alabama—and the entire United States. After frequent setbacks in the movement, such as telephone insults and harassment, firings, jailings, firebombings of homes and churches, unfair and hostile treatment by insurance agencies, and local court injunctions to quell civic activism, on November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on Montgomery buses was unconstitutional.

In the initial chapter, “How It All Started,” Parks prefaces her book with an early memory of a “time that a white man treated me like a regular little girl, not a little black girl.” As she relates, “A Yankee soldier patted me on the head and said I was a cute little girl.” The gesture and remark were atypical. Parks then lists the nurturing people in her family and the community who played some small part in her resolute goal “not to take no stuff off white people.” Reared in her maternal grandparents’ home, Parks informs readers that Sylvester Edwards instilled in his daughters (Leona and Fannie) and their children “a don’t put up with bad treatment from anybody” credo. Parks maintains that this tenet “was passed down almost in our genes.”

Out of fear of reprisals, most black people in Alabama did “not stand up to white people,” but Gus Vaughn, Parks’s childhood neighbor and the father of several little children who often did work in the cotton fields of Pine Level, refused to work for white people or, for whatever reason, anybody else. He was one of a few black men in the town who had “the courage to stand up to whites.” Vaughn’s lack of deference to them was a source of pride to the young Rosa. Many decades later, one of his descendants almost became a test case for examining Montgomery’s discriminatory bus laws. In the spring of 1955, before Parks’s historic “I’m tired” defiance to segregation laws, Claudette Colvin, Vaughn’s great-granddaughter, refused to give up her seat in the middle section of a bus to a white person. Unlike Parks, who would repeat the young woman’s defiance months later, Colvin was dragged from the bus and arrested. Parks admired her courage.

If the Old Guard citizenry in Montgomery had known of the activist role of Raymond Parks, the author’s husband, in attempting to dismantle unfair public policies and laws, he would have been beaten or killed. Much like Vaughn, Rosa’s grandfather, and her young brother, Sylvester, Raymond refused to kowtow to white supremacy. When Rosa married him in 1932, he was already a long-time member of the NAACP and was working secretly with people outside Montgomery on behalf of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of African American men accused of raping two white women. Raymond Parks supported his wife’s volunteerism and encouraged her to complete her education and to register to vote when she turned twenty-one, even though, because of limited schooling, he was unable to pass the literacy test. After the couple moved to Detroit in 1957, he voted for the first time.

Critical Context

Rosa Parks is more than the autobiography of a great freedom fighter. The book unearths myriad civil rights precursors in Rosa Parks’s family and community who survived indignities with their pride and courage intact. Besides Rosa Parks, young readers may want to peruse Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) for more glimpses of the challenges that black girls and women faced in the South. Much like Rosa Parks, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), and Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree (1963) and Voices in the Mirror (1990) are wonderful melanges on African American cultural history and social critique. Providing a searing glance of what it was like to be black in America before the Civil Rights movement—and especially the South—Rosa Parks is a primer on the contradictions of the American Dream.