The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks by Jeanne Theoharis

(Beacon, $28)

Jeanne Theoharis’s new book “challenges what we thought we knew” about Rosa Parks, said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. In public memory, Parks was a meek Montgomery, Ala., seamstress who in 1955 simply felt too tired one day to give up her bus seat to a white man; following her death, in 2005, The New York Times called her “the accidental matriarch of the civil-rights movement.” In reality, Parks’s catalyzing role was no fluke: She had been a dedicated civil-rights worker for years before her brave stand triggered the Montgomery bus boycott. Theoharis’s purpose isn’t to expose Parks as a fraud; the author understands that opponents often smeared any civil-rights activist as a Communist. But she’s done history a great service by replacing the Parks of myth with a woman of true “flesh and blood.”

Parks was clearly no shrinking violet, said Kevin Boyle in The Washington Post. “I would be lynched rather than be run over,” she once told her grandmother. After joining Montgomery’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in 1943, Parks poured her energy into registering voters and battling to win justice for black women raped by white men. But Theoharis’s account also adds a “depressing” new dimension to the story. In the aftermath of the bus boycott, Parks became both a celebrity and a target: She was hammered with death threats, a drastic rent hike, and the loss of her job, forcing her and her husband to pack up and leave the South for good.

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Unfortunately, Theoharis’s biography is both exhaustive and exhausting, said Terry Hong in CSMonitor.com. A reader needs serious patience to push past the author’s “tedious repetition, fragmented chronology, and countless ‘might have/could have’ assumptions.” Still, at a time when a dispute about Parks’s personal archives limits scholars’ ability to study her life, Theoharis’s book represents “an essential addition to any library or classroom”—an important corrective that should enhance, not diminish, Parks’s legacy.