Rosa Parks

In Her Own Words

Susan Reyburn

Foreword by Carla D. Hayden

Title Details

Pages: 96

Illustrations: 83 b&w and color images

Trim size: 8.000in x 8.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 12/15/2019

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5692-1

List Price: $17.95

Subsidies and Partnerships

Published with the generous support of Sarah Mills Hodge Fund

Rosa Parks

In Her Own Words

Susan Reyburn

Foreword by Carla D. Hayden

A never-before-seen collection of the civil rights icon’s personal writing and photographs

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  • Description
  • Reviews

Until recently, Rosa Parks’s personal papers were unavailable to the public. In this compelling new book from the Library of Congress, where the Parks Collection is housed, the civil rights icon is revealed for the first time in print through her private manuscripts and handwritten notes. Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words illumines her inner thoughts, her ongoing struggles, and how she came to be the person who stood up by sitting down.

At the height of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as Parks was both pilloried and celebrated, she found a catharsis in her writing. Her precise descriptions of her arrest, the segregated South, and her recollections of childhood resistance to white supremacy document a lifetime of battling inequality. Parks expressed her thoughts on paper using whatever was available—meeting agendas, event programs, drugstore bags. The book features one hundred color and black-and-white photographs from the Parks collection, many appearing in print for the first time, along with ephemera from the long life of a private person in the public eye.

The new book…explores a variety of objects from the Rosa Parks Collection that bring to light Parks’ inner thoughts and struggles throughout her life and activism.

—Fine Books Magazine

In Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words, author Susan Reyburn provides a candid look into Parks’ personal life through previously unreleased letters, documents and photographs. . . . This courageous woman packed so much into her life, and likewise, the details of her life are packed into this inspiring portrait.

—Matt Gifford, BookPage

Narrated in simple prose, this concise yet moving tribute spotlights an inspiring progressive leader and demonstrates how the historical record should be studied. For readers of African American history of all ages.

—Clayton Boyer, Library Journal

About the Author/Editor

SUSAN REYBURN is a senior writer-editor in the Library of Congress Publishing Office. She is the author of Football Nation: Four Hundred Years of America’s Game; Women Who Dare: Amelia Earhart; and Gardens and Landscapes of the National Trust for Historic Preservation; and she is a coauthor of Baseball Americana: Treasures from the Library of Congress; The Library of Congress World War II Companion; and The Civil War Desk Reference. She has also written for a wide variety of LOC publications on classic American film, theater, art, and architecture, and numerous works for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.