Excerpt
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): By the time Rosa Parks died in Detroit in 2005, her place in the history books was assured. She was the first lady of civil rights, the mother of the freedom movement. Mourners lined up in three cities to pay their respects, in Montgomery, Ala., at the U.S. Capitol, where she was the first woman and only second African-American to lie in honor, and in her adopted hometown of Detroit, where her funeral ran for more than seven hours.
Everyone agreed that the 92-year-old Parks had made history when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus in 1955. Her arrest sparked a 382-day bus boycott that caught the attention of a movement and a nation.
But there was more to Rosa Parks' action that day, which was neither as random or as isolated as it has come to be seen. Now, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, a new biography explores "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks."
The author is Jeanne Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
The word rebellious doesn't usually appear in the same sentence as Rosa Parks. She is a different person than we thought.
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