Rosa Parks was a radical, lifelong black liberation activist, not a "meek seamstress"

Jeanne Theoharis, an academic who wrote the biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, reminds us that the historical account of Rosa Parks as an apolitical seamstress who was too tired and exasperated to go to the back of the bus is a fiction: Parks was a brave, committed lifelong race and gender activist who risked her life and livelihood for a cause that she championed ferociously from an early age and never abandoned. (more…)