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Rosa Parks's birthday is February 4. This smiling, bespectacled 83-year-old (about to be 84) looks the part of a favorite grandmother rather than the forebear of the modern-day civil rights movement. From her simple act of refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man one day in December 1955, she sparked the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Soon a relatively unknown Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Montgomery to lead the boycott which lasted for 381 days before the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on public transportation.
Two new books about this determined and compassionate woman make her story live for today's children. Younger readers will like I Am Rosa Parks (Dial, $12.99, 0803712065) written by Parks and Jim Haskins with terrific full-color illustrations on every page by Wil Clay. Based on Dial's earlier publication for older kids, Rosa Parks: My Story, the large, well-spaced type presents Parks's story in lively, simple language (reading level 2.2). Young children will understand Parks's quiet courage when she says, "I was just tired of giving in."
Taking a different tack for an older audience, Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue with Today's Youth (Lee & Low, $16.95, 1880000458) is a selection of letters Parks has received from young people over the last 40 years along with her answers. The questions are interesting in themselves. They run the gamut from the "What was it like . . .?" historical sort to the current "I love TV. Why should we go to school and read when we can watch TV?" Questions come from all over the U.S. -- even one from London.
Happy birthday, Rosa. You deserve it.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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