The inspirational story of Rosa Parks.

Goodreads Review:
She had not sought this moment but she was ready for it. When the policeman bent down to ask “Auntie, are you going to move?” all the strength of all the people through all those many years joined in her. She said, “No.”

A picture book account of Rosa Park's historic choice.

Title: Rosa
- Author: Nikki Giovanni
- Illustrator: Bryan Collier
- Publisher: Scholastic, Inc.
- Date: 2005 (year published)
- Pages: 32
- Type of Book/Genre: Picture Book, Non-Fiction
- Short Summary of the Plot: At the beginning of the book, it talks about Rosa’s family, and how she was a really good seamstress. She was told by her boss that she could leave early that day, so she went to the bus. While she was on the bus, she sat in the “neutral” section of the bus that day (where white people or black people could sit). The bus driver yelled at her to give up her seat and move to the crowded back section of the bus. Some people were yelling she should be arrested, some people got off the bus, and some people said she had a right to sit where she was. The police were then called, and while she waited in her spot for them to arrive she thought about the brave folks that stood up for civil rights, and was tired of the separate but equal laws. Rosa Parks, got arrested, and women of color gathered together to create fliers that urged people not to ride the buses in support of Rosa Parks. Martin Luther King Jr. took the lead and urged people to not take the buses. About a year later, the law was passed that segregation on buses was illegal.
- Tags/Subject headings that describe the content: Rosa Parks, civil rights leaders, true events with timelines.
- My Response: I really enjoyed this book and liked how they included specific facts with dates and references to people.

This book takes the story of Rosa Parks and turns it into an amazing book for young children. This is a book that teaches them about who she was and why she was so important to the civil rights movement. Its a book that students can easily understand and gain great knowledge from. ( )

The key strengths of this book are a) it's absolutely important message and b) it's stunning illustrations, which seem to be a combination of collage and painting. Rosa more than lived up to its promise in both categories.

But...I'm not entirely sure who the audience is for this book. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that I'm white. To me, most of the story seems to geared toward kids about 5 to 7--they need to be able to sit for longer reading sections and they need to understand some bigger words and concepts. But then Giovanni brings up Emmett Till, lynching (not defined in the text), and his open-casket funeral. So we've gone from the kind of harassments that kids might be familiar with from bullies (the implied "get out of my seat" and "you don't belong here", as well as Giovanni's ominously vague "potential for ugliness") to some incredibly dark territory, including words and events that adults will have to explain. (I believe there is now or soon will be a picture book about Emmett Till's mother.) This is a book-long story about Rosa Parks, but I feel like that one paragraph about Emmett Till would probably spark the most and most difficult conversations.

From that point on, as the story gets larger than just Rosa, it also has a couple sidetracks: in addition to the paragraph about Emmett Till, there is, for some reason, an entire paragraph about using a stencil-making machine. Giovanni also drops in the NAACP, "the nonviolent movement", "segregation" (not previously defined) and the doozy of a phrase, "makes no provision for second-class citizenship." All of these are important things, of course, but they mean that you need a kid who's a) old enough to either sit all the way through a longer reading or read this book for themselves and b) old enough to ask for more information instead of just getting bored when they don't understand something. That age probably varies by child.

I appreciate Giovanni's efforts to add in a few feminist comments, such as Rosa Park's thought that men take up more space than women. There's a parallel there with white people demanding that black people give them more space. Then Mrs.-Robinson-who's-actually-Dr.-Robinson has to make dinner, clean, put children to bed, and kiss her husband goodbye before she can go organize the bus boycott. To me, the critique is obvious--why the heck is an important woman doing all these chores without her husband helping when there's important work to be done? However, neither of these situations have any indication that this is not the way things have to be. In Rosa's mind, "Men take up more space." Period. Fact. To Dr. Mrs. Robinson, there's no annoyance or alternative. For both of them, it seems like this is just the way it is. If they can protest their treatment at the hands of white people, why do they let men walk all over them?

There also isn't really a conclusion to Rosa Parks' own story. We know she was arrested. How long was she in jail? How did she get out? Did she go to court? Did she ever get on a bus again? For a book called Rosa, this one doesn't stay focused on Rosa more than about halfway.

Gosh I feel like I'm being a grump about this award-winning, absolutely beautifully illustrated book. It addresses a lot of the annoying myths that white people like to say: that Rosa didn't stand up because she was tired from working (Giovanni spins this word out brilliantly) and that her protest ended segregation and that black people and white people all lived happily ever after. I'd love to talk to a teacher who uses this book in their curriculum to hear how they use it, what books they use as supplements, and what their conversations are like. Of course, these days this book is probably being banned from classrooms, because [sarcasm] how dare we teach children that progress is possible if doing so makes white people look bad? [end sarcasm]

Finally, about that amazing art: it's a little thing, but I love that Collier gets a little space for an illustrator's note. Ever since I started reading the historical notes in the back of American Girl books, I've loved reading everything that authors and illustrators can tell us about their work. ( )