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

Kohl, Herbert R.; Brown, Cynthia Stokes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1595581278 ISBN 13: 9781595581273

Publisher: The New Press, 2007

Synopsis

The prizewinning educator’s brilliant and timely meditation on the misleading ways in which we teach the story of Rosa Parks

Published in hardcover in the fall of 2005 shortly before Rosa Parks died, She Would Not Be Moved is a timely and important exploration of how the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott has been distorted when taught in schools. Hailed by the New York Times Book Review when it was first published as having “the transcendent power that allows us to see . . . alternate ways of viewing our history and understanding what is going on in our classrooms,” this expanded version of Kohl’s original groundbreaking discussion “deftly catalogs problems with the prevailing presentations of Parks and offers [a] more historically accurate, politically pointed and age-appropriate alternative” (Chicago Tribune).

In addition to Marian Wright Edelman’s introduction, She Would Not Be Moved includes an original essay by Cynthia Brown on civil rights activists Septima Clark, Virginia Durr, and Rosa Parks; a teachers’ resource guide to educational materials about Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement; and an appendix explaining how to evaluate textbooks for young people about this critical period in U.S. history.

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 & Writers Collaborative in New York City and established the PEN West Center in San Francisco, where he lives. Marian Wright Edelman is founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund. She lives in Washington, D.C.

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 this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1595581278
• ISBN 13: 9781595581273
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 126