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

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King are no longer real people in the popular imagination; they are cartoon characters. In this important book, Herbert Kohl summarizes the various ways we teach our children about Mrs. Parks, and contrasts them with the truth. It is quite shameful, really, what we teach our children these days. We can't teach the truth - that Rosa Parks was a trained civil rights leader, a respected member of the community, and a middle-class mother and wife, who risked her life to confront racism - because we're afraid of racial tension in the classroom. We can't teach about the civil rights movement if we can't talk about white racism. This book provides some constructive models for how to do that.