She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Rosa Parks' role to ignite the Civil Rights movement has been depicted in ways that misrepresent and distort her decision to refuse to give up her seat on the bus so many years ago. This book examines a number of childhood educational books about Parks. In contrast, this book sees her act as one of courage, determination, and calculated risk, rather than being prompted by tiredness and anger. To represent her act as spontaneous and driven by weariness, he maintains, is to misunderstand who Parks really was and what her defiant stand really meant. This depiction does a tremendous disservice to the black community that carried out the resulting 381-day bus boycott and to its leadership. This is the first book to discuss the effect of this kind of historical distortion on children's education.