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Rosa Parks by Douglas Brinkley

© Michelle Troutman

A middle-aged seamstress and department store clerk at the time, Rosa Parks was a seemingly unlikely person to refuse to give her seat to a white man on a segregated Montgomery city bus and later become considered "The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement."

Rosa Parks is one of the many biographies in Penguin Putnam's recently launched Penguin Lives series "pairing celebrated writers with famous individuals who have shaped our thinking." Biographer Brinkley documents her entire life, before and after her 15 minutes of fame which lead to a thirteen-month boycott and eventual desegregation of Montgomery, Alabama's public transportation, thought to be the start of the modern civil rights movement. He also adeptly reveals what's not widely known -- she was already an activist and many factors played into her decision to stay in her seat on a segregated public bus in 1955. As a charter member of her local chapter of the NAACP, her barber husband Raymond's local activism influenced her. They hosted NAACP meetings in their home. She started a black voter registration drive, and served as NAACP branch secretary and Youth Council advisor. And in the months leading up to her famous protest, she attended Myles Horton's "activist school" the Highlander Folk School, which would influence her to become a more vocal activist.

Brinkley also recounts alongside Parks' biography the racism and segregation of the time and while she was growing up. As a girl she absorbed Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington's philosophies of high moral character, cleanliness, hard work, and thrift. She learned never to lose her pride despite threats and fear of Ku-Klux Klan attacks.

Also central to the book is the friendship between Mrs. Parks and the young, then unknown minister Martin Luther King, Jr. He took up her cause, as did many local black activists, and the boycott would lead to his fame and civil rights leadership.

Brinkley presents Parks as a woman of quiet dignity and strength who fought for her beliefs and a better life for herself and all blacks. He compares her to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, however, he aims for a balanced portrait; she wasn't the first black woman to start a bus boycott, only the most successful. For instance, in 1884 newspaperwoman Ida B. Wells, while traveling through Memphis in a "whites only" railway car refused to leave her seat, only to be taken off the train by three white men. Wells won a suit against the railroad but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the decision; Charlotte Hawkins Brown, North Carolina Federation of Women's Clubs president (1915 to 1936), sued the same railway over being removed from a train during a ride, and received a settlement. He cites many

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