The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks

Jeanne Theoharis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, is a scholar of the civil rights and Black Power movements. She holds a Ph.D. in American culture from the University of Michigan. Theoharis is the co-author of 11 books, and she won the 2014 NAACP Image Award for The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.

Theoharis’s book on Rosa Parks explores how the symbolization of Rosa Parks both contributed to the civil rights movement and detracted from the reality of Parks’s activism and struggles. She discusses these ideas further in her book A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History. In a 2018 interview with NPR, Theoharis suggests that history is meant to teach humility and to inform one’s view of the present. Her work on Parks emphasizes how whitewashing the past allows discrimination to continue unchecked.

Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was born in Alabama. Her mother encouraged her daughter to pursue education, and her family instilled in her a sense of pride and the desire to enact change. Parks devoted her life to activism. Although she is best known for her stand on a Montgomery bus, Parks spent 10 years prior to this date working tirelessly for the civil rights movement, advocating for victims of white abuse and violence, fighting unjust and inequitable voting practices, and educating youth to challenge systems of oppression.