Rosa Parks: First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement

This capsule biography of Rosa Parks (1913-2005)—the Montgomery, AL, seamstress whose act of defiance on a city bus galvanized the Civil Rights movement—does a fine job of explaining how Parks's challenge of Jim Crow segregation laws helped to ultimately topple them. The documentary features contextual history about the state of racial oppression in America's Deep South between the end of slavery and hard-won desegregation, a time when African-Americans lived in fear of the Ku Klux Klan and every effort was made to limit the amount of exposure that black and white people had to one another. Basic services, such as school bus transportation, weren't available to African-Americans, and official obstacles to voting—such as prohibitive poll taxes—intentionally disenfranchised the black vote. Against this backdrop, Parks's early life was spent in part at the progressive Industrial School for Girls in Montgomery, where she gained greater self-respect. While riding a bus home from her department store job one day, Parks was ordered to relinquish her seat to a white passenger. She refused to do so, resulting in her arrest. Parks's case would inspire the Montgomery black community and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to launch a bus boycott, which lasted more than a year. Along with the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating schools, the boycott helped create momentum for the Civil Rights movement. Parks's education in activism and her involvement with the NAACP prior to and long after the boycott is touched upon, as is her work in later years for African-American Congressman John Conyers, and her various honors near the end of her life. Highly recommended. Aud: I, J, H, P. (T. Keogh)