Once upon a time, in Brooklyn, I wrote “Rosa Parks” in all capitals on a piece of paper and taped it to a chair. My students and I placed it up by the board, so that she would always have a seat in the front of our classroom. For the rest of the year, or awhile at least, when someone forgot and started to sit in this chair somebody would call out, “Hey! That’s Rosa’s seat!” Silly? Perhaps… but my classroom could get that way; it kept language arts interesting!
102 years ago today, in 1913, Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Alabama; 60 years ago, in 1955, Rosa Louise McCauley Parks entered the national stage by refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. However, this act of civil disobedience was not her first step on the path of protest; 12 years prior to the bus incident, in 1943, Rosa Parks was elected the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, she tried (unsuccessfully) to register to vote, and she was thrown off of a bus for refusing to use the back door. Looking through Rosa Parks: A True Book Biography, in preparation for this post, I learned my new thing for the day, which is that in 1954 she worked with teenagers to stage a protest at a local library that wouldn’t lend books to blacks. Rosa Parks made an impact on American history that directly relates to my day-to-day, librarian/commuter that I am, so I put brain to internet and came up with a few options for commemorating her birthday:
- Read about the materials opening to researchers today at the National Archives
- Select one of the outstanding books published about her life and share it with a child
- Investigate newspaper articles about her life to use in a lesson with your class
- Watch book discussions with biographers who researched her life extensively
Thinking back on the Rosa Parks chair, I can’t remember why we did this. Did I plan this for a lesson? Did it happen in the middle of a discussion? Was this my idea or one of the students?? How long was it there?? I just remember the chair, maneuvering around it to write on the board for awhile, and that no one was allowed to sit in it. When I locate my teaching portfolio, I will scan the picture that I have and add it to this post.
Rosa Parks left the world a better place than she found it.
How do you celebrate her birthday?
