Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written.
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Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written.

Professor Danielle McGuire’s important work details the never- before-told story of Recy Taylor, a woman who was a major inspiration for Rosa Parks’ influence on the civil rights movement. Black women’s protests against sexual assault fueled civil rights campaigns throughout the South that began during World War II and went through the Black Power movement. The Montgomery bus boycott was the baptism, not the birth of the struggle.