‘Giving Scholars the Historical past They Want’

Though nineteen states have passed laws or imposed rules to restrict how public school teachers discuss race, racism, or other subjects deemed  “divisive” in their classrooms, many educators are pushing back on these boundaries and are using every tool at their disposal to help students understand U.S. history and social justice movements. 

In fact, more than 13,000 teachers in forty-seven states are currently teaching The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,  young readers edition, an adaptation of Jeanne Theoharis’s award-winning 2013 deconstruction of the “national fable” that reduces Parks to a tired, middle-aged woman who simply took a seat on a bus and inadvertently started a movement.

The exhaustively researched book counters this myth and presents Parks as a lifelong activist who joined the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP in 1943, rose to leadership, and subsequently used her influence, savvy, and intellectual prowess to advocate for Black power, peace, and racial equality until her death in 2005. It’s a powerful, eye-opening account and a valuable assessment of how historical events and figures can be manipulated, reduced, or embellished to serve the status quo.

Kyair Butts, Baltimore’s 2019 Teacher of the Year and an English language arts instructor at Elmer A. Henderson: A Johns Hopkins Partnership School, taught The Rebellious Life this spring in his sixth-grade honors class. “We analyzed how people, events, and ideas influence and impact each other,” he tells The Progressive. The book also prompted his students to investigate how society limits and promotes personal identity; how visual images impact our perception of political events; and how political movements can be sustained and derailed.

Butts calls the book “a grounding text” and is grateful to the Zinn Education Project for making it available, for free, thanks to funding from Lush Cosmetics. The book is part of the Project’s Teach Truth campaign, a program that is intended to push back against conservative hysteria over “critical race theory.”

The impetus for the young adult edition, Theoharis says, came from the grassroots response to the book. “After the original text came out, I had a chance to speak to audiences all over the country, and the one thing I was consistently asked was if I was going to write a version for children and teens.”

“She didn’t like that she was known for that day on the bus when she held a lifetime of political experience.”

At first, she says, the answer was “no.” But when the Library of Congress obtained Parks’s memorabilia in 2014, Theoharis wanted to see if the collection included any bombshells or previously undisclosed information.  

“I was super excited and super worried,” Theoharis tells The Progressive, “but the digitized archive strengthened what was in the adult book and made my arguments deeper and richer. Parks’s voice, her politics, and what it means to be a longtime activist came through, but her writing also made clear how much she and her family suffered. This is palpable in her papers and has been integrated into the young adult text.” 

Theoharis says that, as she and co-author Brandy Colbert strategized about the framing of the young adult book, they knew that they wanted to avoid a two-dimensional portrayal of Parks as an “accidental activist,” and asked themselves why this depiction is so common.  Their conclusion? “It’s meant to give the impression that the movement succeeded and is now over,” Theoharis says. 

Theoharis and Colbert know that this is untrue, and want readers to think beyond legislation and the law. What’s more, as  they delved into Parks’s life and grappled with the reasons she was motivated to get involved in the fight for civil rights, they saw connections to today’s Black Lives Matter movement–something they hope will resonate and ring true for readers. 

She calls this “giving students the history they need.”

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks also zeroes in on the outrageous sexism of civil rights leaders who sidelined Parks and other women activists and addresses the debate over non-violence versus armed struggle. Throughout, the book emphasizes Parks’s belief in the value of direct action and “the need to disrupt unjust systems;” this led her to support both the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panthers. 

More personally, Theoharis and Colbert stress that Parks often bristled at the way she was depicted by the press and movement historians. “She found it annoying that people reduced her resistance to segregation to tired feet when her feet were never the problem—the problem was injustice,” they write. “She didn’t like that she was known for that day on the bus when she held a lifetime of political experience.”   

Additionally, the Montgomery bus boycott, which took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, began just days after Parks’s arrest for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man and caused tremendous personal suffering, from the loss of her job to the nervous breakdown of her husband, Raymond. The book is unsparing as it details the lasting toll this had on the Parks family.

Equally appalling, the authors write, the fact that mainstream media typically equate Parks exclusively with the bus boycott reflects a profound “lack of interest in her focus on fighting northern racism [in Detroit].” This left the second half of her life, including years working for Congressman John Conyers, “largely hidden in plain sight.”

The Rebellious Life aims to change this and presents her six decades of activism realistically and movingly.

Kyair Butts’s sixth graders appreciated learning the truth about Rosa Parks’s longstanding  activism “They related to her and thought about themselves and their place and role in the world,” Butts says. “They asked themselves how far we as a country have actually come, pointed out continued disparities and inequalities, and were thoughtful about ways they can become change agents in their communities.” 

Neither teachers nor students could possibly expect more from a text.