Rosa Parks: My Story. - book reviews

HER heroic story-the story of a movement and its beginnings been told countless times in books and scholarly papers, in magazine articles and documentaries, in movies, plays and television programs. But always it was filtered through someone else's lens-, rarely have we heard her tell of the day that she helped change the course of American history. Until now.

Now Rosa Parks, considered by many to be the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, tells her own story with the help of prolific biographer jim Haskins. In Rosa Parks: My Story Dial Books, $17), Mrs. Parks relates the events in her life which led to the fateful day on December 1, 1955, when her simple refusal to relinquish her seat to a White man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., touched off a yearlong bus boycott and heightened national interest in the nascent Black American Freedom Movement.

But Mrs. Parks' story neither begins nor ends with that historic event. A tireless speaker for the Civil Rights Movement before and after the boycott, her autobiography-written to appeal to readers ages 10 and up-charts a lifetime of activism and commitment to social justice.

As Coretta Scott King has written about the book: "Mrs. Parks has movingly evoked the experiences and influences that shaped her formative years, the events that led to her appointment with history and her unrelenting faith. Here, in her own words is the story of one of America's greatest freedom fighters.