She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks And the Montgomery Bus Boycott [Hardcover]

Herbert Kohl (Author), Marian Wright Edelman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2005

The prizewinning educator's brilliant meditation on the misleading way generations of children have been taught the story of Rosa Parks.

One day Rosa was tired. She sat in the front. The bus driver told her to move. She did not. He called the police. Rosa was put in jail.—from an American elementary school textbook

When National Book Award winner and bestselling author Herbert Kohl first published a reflection on how the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott is distorted when taught to children, Vivian Paley wrote, "Kohl urges us to look beneath our smug certainties and come closer and closer to the truth."

Now, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of that famous moment in the history of the civil rights movement, Kohl has expanded and updated his original discussion. Beginning with a new introduction by Marian Wright Edelman, She Would Not Be Moved also includes a contribution by Cynthia Brown on Septima Clark, Virginia Durr, and Rosa Parks.

The book also includes a teacher's guide explaining how to evaluate textbooks written for young people, an extensive resource guide to educational materials about Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement, and a dozen black-and-white photographs.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Kohl argues that Rosa Parks and her role in helping to ignite the Civil Rights movement have been depicted in childrens books in ways that misrepresent and distort her decision to refuse to give up her seat on the bus so many years ago. He examined a number of school texts and childrens books about Parks. In contrast to many of them, he sees her act as one of courage, determination, and calculated risk and is critical of those books that view her behavior as being prompted by tiredness and anger. To represent her act as spontaneous and driven by weariness, he maintains, is to misunderstand who Parks really was and what her defiant stand really meant. According to Kohl, this depiction does a tremendous disservice to the black community that carried out the resulting 381-day bus boycott and to its leadership as well. Kohls position is not new. A number of scholarly texts place Parks and her act of defiance within a social, historical, and political context, calling attention to her long-held desire to affect radical racial change and the tactics for community mobilization that emerged. But Kohls is the first book to discuss the effect of this kind of historical distortion on children. The teaching strategies he suggests, the numerous books he consulted, and his sensitive exploration of a thorny problem make this a book that can be helpful to everyone concerned about how young people understand race and how it is played out in this country.–Carol Jones Collins, Columbia High School, Maplewood, NJ
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About the Author

Herbert Kohl is the author of more than forty books, including the bestselling classic 36 Children. A recipient of the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, he was founder and first director of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York. He lives in San Francisco.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 126 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (September 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1595580204
• ISBN-13: 978-1595580207
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,144,955 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Truth about Mrs. Parks, October 18, 2006

By 

Paul Grant "historian-in-training, author, sp... (Madison, Wisconsin, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks And the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Hardcover)

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King are no longer real people in the popular imagination; they are cartoon characters. In this important book, Herbert Kohl summarizes the various ways we teach our children about Mrs. Parks, and contrasts them with the truth.

It is quite shameful, really, what we teach our children these days. We can't teach the truth - that Rosa Parks was a trained civil rights leader, a respected member of the community, and a middle-class mother and wife, who risked her life to confront racism - because we're afraid of racial tension in the classroom.

We can't teach about the civil rights movement if we can't talk about white racism. This book provides some constructive models for how to do that.