Rosa Parks: Myth & Memory in the American Civil Rights Movement

Bad Women Series, #4 of 4. The popular image of Parks is one of quiet, and demure respectability. When we were in elementary school, we were taught that Parks was a tired old woman, whose feet hurt after a long day on the job. Because she was a Black woman living in the south, she was relegated to the “back of the bus” on Montgomery, Alabama’s public transportation. Yet, that day Parks did not move to the back of the bus. It was understood that her personal feelings and fatigue were the reason she did not give up her seat for a white passenger on that fateful day in December 1955, not her “lifetime of being rebellious,” as Parks herself said about her activism. Today we’ll discuss Rosa Parks, the mid twentieth century civil rights movement in the United States, and the formation of memory.

Get the transcript and full bibliography for this episode at digpodcast.org

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Carl Wendell Hines, reprinted in Vincent Gordon Harding, “Beyond Amnesia: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Future of America,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 74, No. 2 (Sep., 1987): 468-476.

Jeanne Theoharis, “’A Life History of Being Rebellious’: The Radicalism of Rosa Parks,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Jeanne Theoharis (New York University Press, 2009), 115.

Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

Rosa Parks, My Story (New York: Dial Books, 1992).

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