Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Title: Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott
2007 Sibert Honor Book, 2oo7 NCTE Orbis Pictus Honor Book
Author: Russell Freedman
Published: 2006
Interesting Facts: (1) "...Women's Political Council...had been founded three years earlier when the local League of Women Voters refused to accept blacks...segregated seating on public buses became the group's most pressing issue..." (pg 10). (2) People said that Rosa Parks did not move from her seat on the bus because she was tired. Rosa Parks has said, " 'But that isn't true...I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day...No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.' She had made up her mind long before that if she was ever asked to give up her seat for a white person, she would refuse" (pg 27). (3) People that cared for Mrs. Parks warned her not to allow her case to be used in the courts to put an end to segregation laws, " '...the white folks will kill you, Rosa...Don't do anything to make trouble, Rosa.' Racially motivated killings were not uncommon in the Jim Crow South. Early that year, two black men had been shot dead in Mississippi while trying to register African Americans voters" (pg. 31). (4) ...two days after the boycott ended, a shotgun blast was fired into King's home...a car pulled up to a bust stop where a 15-year-old black girl was standing...men jumped out, beat her, and drove away...shotgun snipers began to fire at integrated buses,, sending a pregnant black woman to the hospital with bullet wounds..." (pg. 89-90). (5) "Rosa Parks never expected to make history. ' I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to enforced segregation in the South...' the Montgomery bus boycott marked the beginning of what we now recognize as the modern civil rights movement" (pg 89).
Curriculum/Pathfinder Suggestion:
US National History Standards, Postwar, Grades 5-12, Standard 4c: Identify the major social, economic, and political issues affecting women and explain the conflicts these issues engendered.