Our Auntie Rosa : The Family of Rosa Parks Remembers the Life and Lessons of the Civil Rights Icon

Our Auntie Rosa is the most intimate portrait yet of the great American hero—"the lady who refused to sit in the back of the bus."

     The family of Rosa Parks share their remembrances of the woman who was not only the mother of the civil rights movement, but a nurturing mother figure to them as well. Her brave act on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955, was just one moment in a life lived with great humility and decency.

     After the deaths of Rosa Parks's husband and brother, her nieces and nephews became her only family and the closest that she would ever experience to having biological sons and daughters. In this book, they share with readers what she shared with them about her experiences growing up in a racist South, her deep dedication to truth and justice, and the personal values she held closest to her heart.

Sheila McCauley Keys is the seventh niece of civil rights heroine Rosa Parks. In 2013, Keys was featured in PBS's live television broadcast of the National Day of Courage, celebrating what would have been Mrs. Parks's hundredth birthday. That same year, Keys joined President Obama and legislators in unveiling a statue of Rosa Parks in the Capitol Rotunda. Keys has become an active voice in efforts to preserve her aunt's legacy.

Eddie B. Allen Jr. is the author of Low Road: The Life and Legacy of Donald Goines and is an award-winning reporter and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times and the Detroit Free Press, on BET.com, and with Reuters and the Associated Press. A Rosa Parks Scholarship recipient at age seventeen, he later covered Parks's nationally televised funeral, as well as various aspects of the freedom struggle that carries her footprint.