Rosa Parks was a quiet, dignified African-American woman who, in a world of injustice, decided to politely defy a racist policy. In doing so, she ignited a fire in the soul of a community whose “cup of endurance” would permit not even one more comparatively small injustice. Her case resulted in the Montgomery Bus Boycott wherein some 40,000 African-Americans crippled the Montgomery transportation industry with their non-violent protest of the racist policy that mandated Parks to give up her seat for white riders. But, as an unknown black minister was who elected to lead the boycott protest, one Martin Luther King, Jr., noted, it wasn’t just the bus policy the African-American community was protesting, it was over 100 years of horrific injustice heaped upon a community whose founders had been forcibly brought to the United States. It was time for a change, and the act of defiance by Parks, though not the first sacrifice, created the spark that would ignite the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. This book tells the story of the context in which Parks’ refusal to yield her seat was set as well as the story of her life and legacy in a compelling, yet succinct, manner that is both packed with information and entertaining to read.
