Rosa Parks

A Penguin Life

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by Douglas Brinkley

Viking Press

Due/Published May 2000, 176 pages, cloth

ISBN 0670891606

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.

Douglas Brinkley is Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans. He is the author of several award-winning books. A regular commentator on National Public Radio, his articles have appeared in publications that include The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly.