Content Warning: The source material and this study guide discuss rape and anti-Black racism.

Famed civil rights activist Rosa Parks is one of the book’s central figures, and McGuire closely examines her actions in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Despite Parks’s fame, however, most historical accounts of the civil rights movement overlook Parks’s engagement with activism throughout her life. Typically, Parks is remembered as a polite and kind middle-class woman who refused to give up her bus seat due to her physical fatigue. As McGuire shows, such an image of Parks is a myth. In reality, Parks was motivated by her deep anger at the ongoing injustices of Jim Crow. By focusing on the entirety of Parks’s life, McGuire shows how Parks’s actions in the Montgomery bus boycott stemmed from a long engagement with activism that was often radical.

Parks was born in Alabama to working-class parents in 1912, and she spent several years of her childhood living with her father’s family in Abbeville, Alabama. As a child, Parks was close with her grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, who instilled in Parks a passion for combatting racism by teaching her about Black activists such as Marcus Garvey. Parks married the politically oriented Raymond Parks, and together, they engaged in activist campaigns.