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The story of Rosa Parks is well known. Born in Tuskegee, Alabama in 1913, Rosa Parks’ childhood was framed by the severe restrictions on the lives of African-Americans in the southern United States. She attended segregated schools, having to leave High School early to care for her grandmother and mother, both of whom had become ill. Rosa Parks was not able to finish High School until after she was married. She married Raymond Parks in 1932 and they both became involved in the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the Montgomery Voters’ League. She was, therefore, involved in civil rights struggle in the USA long before the bus incident for which she is famous.

On December 1st, 1955, she was sitting in the middle section of the bus on her way home from work. Black people were allowed to sit in this section as long as there were no white passengers standing. Rosa Parks was told to give her seat up to a white male passenger. She refused, was arrested and fined. She later said: “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day….No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in”. Word spread quickly and a boycott of the buses was organised by African-American church and community leaders. This included Martin Luther King, who was little known at the time. The boycott lasted 381 days until Rosa Parks’ case reached the US Supreme Court. The court ruled that blacks and whites could not be segregated on the buses. Rosa Parks’ action is widely credited with being the “spark that lit the fire” of the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, that culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It should be remembered in teaching about this period, however, that the African American struggle against racism can be traced back to the earliest days of slavery. Without detracting from the courage of Rosa Park’s decision, teachers should beware of misleading pupils into thinking that she ‘started it all’. Indeed, in her book Quiet Strength, Rosa Parks says: “Four decades later I am still uncomfortable with the credit given to me for starting the bus boycott. I would like (people) to know I was not the only person involved. I was one of many who fought for freedom”.

Although Rosa Parks won her court case, the harassment of herself and her family continued. They received many death threats and could not find work. In1957, they moved to Detroit where they continued to be involved in the Civil Rights struggle. Rosa Parks worked as staff assistant to US Congressman John Conyers between 1965-1988. In 1987 she co-founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development. This organisation has a special programme called Pathways to Freedom, for young people. They travel across the country tracing the Underground Railroad (the slave escape trails) visiting scenes of critical events in the civil rights movement and learning aspects of African American history.

Rosa Parks continues to be actively involved in African American issues. She has received many awards for her achievement.

Teachers Notes on Resources

There are many (at least 13) published biographies of Rosa Parks, most written for young readers, and all still in print. Rosa Parks has collaborated in the writing of two as autobiographies. I am Rosa Parks (most recently published by Puffin, 1999) is for very young readers, in simple language, large well-spaced type and with illustrations on every page. Rosa Parks: my story (also most recently published by Puffin, in 1999) is geared towards older children.
Dear Mrs.Parks: A dialogue with today’s youth is a collection of letters responding to questions Rosa Parks is often asked by young people (published by Lee & Low, 1997).

Mini-biographies can be found in many books about the Civil Rights Movement.
Useful examples for young people include:

Pat Rediger, Great African Americans in Civil Rights, Crabtree, 1996

Sina Dubovnoy, Civil Rights Leaders, Facts on File Inc, 1997

The civil rights period has been extensively researched and documented.

Enter Rosa Parks on the internet and you call up thousands of references!
Some more useful sites are:

www.rosaparksinstitute.org
This is the official site of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development.

www.tsum.edu/museum/
This is the website of the Troy State University, Montgomery, Rosa Parks Library and Museum.

www.kcstar.com
Has black biographies in a series called 1st Person, with information, quiz questions, quotes, etc.

www.grandtimes.com/rosa
This is a website for senior citizens in the US. This page is an interview with Rosa Parks conducted in 1996, by Kira Albin

Educational websites that have useful material on Rosa Parks include:

www.galegroup.com/free-resources/bhm
Provides resources for Black History Month, including biographical profiles of many African American heroes.

www.aande.com/class/admin/study_guide
Is the website of education programmes of A&E television network. They provide a list of questions about Rosa Parks, and extended activities.

http://teacher.scholastic.com/rosa
Provides information about aspects of the Montgomery campaign and an extended interview with Rosa Parks.
This is the second document in teacher materials

Teaching Ideas:

Autobiography for Young People: Rosa Parks with Jim Haskins,
ROSA PARKS MY STORY, Puffin, 1999

This book has been written for the 10+ age-group and is quite demanding as a reader. There are twelve chapters with a few photographs. Although there are easier texts on Rosa Parks, this is her autobiography for young people.

The book is a recount, told in first person past tense, with occasional use of direct speech. It includes the text of two of the handbills written to encourage people to boycott the buses (p.126 and 130) and a quote from a speech by Dr.Martin Luther King in Montgomery (p.138). These passages offer the opportunity to examine persuasive writing and the rhetoric of speeches, which is supplemented by study of King’s famous Dream speech.

ROSA PARKS MY STORY contains a lot of historic detail about the daily racism experienced by African-Americans and their struggle. This offers children the opportunity to discuss their own experience of exclusion such as bullying, name-calling and racism in society Teachers should be aware that there are passages of direct speech in the book in which the term ‘nigger’ is used.

As this is a US publication, there are American spelling patterns e.g. colored, plow

Chapter 1. ‘How it all Started’ describes the bus protest (p.1) and then explores Parks’ memories of her grandparents and their histories.

Possible teaching points:
Throughout work on this book, pupils can collect words that describe the African American experience of racism, eg. Segregation, boycott, civil rights (see glossary sheet). This list will expand. Some of these words are no longer in common use – discuss how words change over time, and American spellings
Chapters 2 & 3. Describe her childhood, first experiences of school and dawning realization of racism. She also relates her move to Montgomery with her mother and brother, more school memories and why it was that she had to drop out of school to look after her mother.

Possible teaching points:
Pages 22-32, discuss Rosa’s interpretation of her Grandmother’s scolding- how did she come to realize her gran was trying to protect her? List the differences between white and black children’s experiences when Rosa was a child.

Chapters 4 - 7 Describe meeting and marrying Raymond Parks and her first contact with black activism around the case of the Scottsboro boys. Also looks at early voter registration work and the tactics employed to prevent black people having the vote. Rosa Parks took on the role of Secretary of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) in December of 1943 and some of the cases they were involved in are described. The racism experienced by black soldiers returning from World War II is described. There is also description of Rosa Parks’ first trip to Highlander Folk School to learn about implementing racial desegregation after the Supreme Court decision that separate, segregated education was inherently unequal (1954).

Chapter 8 – 10 These three chapters describe the history of bus segregation and the incident which led to her arrest; her trial and the beginnings of community response: the bus boycott, and the eventual decision of the Supreme Court that segregation on the buses was unconstitutional (1956).Continuing violent racism was experienced by leaders such as Ralph Abernathy and M.L.King.

Possible teaching points:
Read p.108, then p.113 “I saw… to p.119 “It didn’t make me feel any better”
Model write a letter to a newspaper protesting about Rosa’s arrest or a newspaper report about the boycott.


Chapters 11 & 12 Describe the Parks’ decision to move to Detroit, their continued activism and the mass march from Selma to Montgomery (1965). The final chapter describes her later years, including meeting Malcolm X, her feelings about non-violent action, the deaths of her husband, mother and brother and the founding of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute.

Possible teaching points:
Read p186-188 “My life has changed” and listen to M.L.King Dream speech. Discuss what still needs to change for racial equality to become real. Examine a print copy of M.L.King Dream speech and explore the development of his rhetorical style from the Montgomery speech. E.g. his use of rhetorical questions, persuasive devices.

NB: There is original news footage of the Selma to Montgomery march on the Channel 4 video: Martin Luther King: The Legacy.
This is the third document in teacher materials

Rosa Parks My Story – A Glossary for teachers

Segregation – the laws and common practices that defined the boundaries of black/white relations, and provided black people with inferior facilities. In the southern states of the US, these laws and practices were often colloquially called ‘Jim Crow’.

Racism – the treatment of people as inferior by the law, government and institutions

Boycott/boycotting – refusing to have anything to do with something, usually for political reasons.

Lynching – a violent illegal killing

Civil rights – the rights of people as citizens of a country

Equal rights – equal treatment of people as citizens

Un-constitutional – against the constitution of a country: its system of laws that formally states people’s rights and duties

Emancipation – the ending of slavery in the United States. The Emancipation Proclamation was made in 1863

Plantation – a large area of land producing crops. Plantations were worked mainly by slaves in the US until 1863, and thereafter by the same people with the new status of sharecroppers or tenant farmers

Slavery – is a system of ownership of people. In America, African-American people were deemed to be the property of white people and suffered brutality and deprivation. There were many instances of slaves rebelling against the system. Slavery was finally abolished in 1863.

Overseer – the person who supervised the work of slaves

Sharecroppers – after the abolition of slavery, most ex-slaves continued to work on plantations. They were allowed to work a piece of land but had to provide a share of their produce to the landowner.

Organisations:
NAACP – National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – established in 1909 and still functioning, this has been a major activist organisation in the struggle for African American rights.

SCLC – Southern Christian Leadership Conference – the key organisation in the coordination of voter-registration drives in the 1960s.

AME - African Methodist Episcopal Church– because of the racism experienced even in church organisations, the AME developed as a church to meet the needs of African Americans. The AME was a very early African American organisation, founded in 1794.

Ku Klux Klan – a right-wing, white supremacist organisation active in the US and known for its involvement in extreme violence


A note on terms:
The acceptability (or otherwise) of terms to describe people changes with political developments. The terms Negro and colored were acceptable to African-Americans themselves for the first half of the twentieth century, but were rejected as demeaning and derogatory during and after the civil rights and Black Power struggles of the 1960s. At that point the term black began to be used politically, to indicate people struggling against racism. In more recent times, people in the US tend to hyphenate their ethnic heritage, and the most frequently-used terms now are African American or black.