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

Herbert Kohl; Marian Wright Edelman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1595580204 ISBN 13: 9781595580207

Publisher: New Press, 2005

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Reviews

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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Edition details

• Publisher: New Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1595580204
• ISBN 13: 9781595580207
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144