Rosa Parks Biography: A Resource for Teaching Rosa Parks

Drawn from The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and various archival sources including Rosa Parks’ newly-opened papers at the Library of Congress, this website project traces the expanse of Rosa Parks’s political work and commitments and the breadth of the Black struggle for justice across the 20th century.  At a moment when many commentators seek to draw a bright line between the good old civil rights movement and new movements for justice today, this fuller history of Rosa Parks shows how dangerous such distinctions are, revealing important continuities between movements then and now and how much her experiences and insights offer us today. This website is the product of the creative collaboration of Say Burgin, Jessica Murray, and Jeanne Theoharis and supported by the Mellon Seminar for Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at the Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center.