Her quiet demeanor helped her fly under the radar - and, frankly, made her an easier symbol for many White people to support than, say, someone like Malcolm X. As Hamilton and Richen’s many interviewees, from family members to fellow civil rights veterans, confirm, Parks was passionate about justice, equal rights, and making change. And so she was arrested - and became a rallying point for the local NAACP, which announced the infamous Montgomery bus boycott.īut this was far from Parks’ first experience with activism: She originally joined the NAACP in 1943 and became a secretary for her chapter, helping them investigate cases like that of Recy Taylor, who was gang-raped by a group of White men in 1944. She was only 42, and she was tired, but her fatigue had more to do with the weight of the unfairness of the Jim Crow South, the horrific lynching death of Emmett Till earlier that same year, and the constant abuse and discrimination Black Americans faced every day than it did with a long day of work. Parks was no meek, downtrodden old woman who stayed seated because she was tired and unable to stand. Rosa Parks makes abundantly clear, she was also a proud radical and lifelong activist. But as Johanna Hamilton and Yoruba Richen’s documentary The Rebellious Life of Mrs.

And there’s no doubt that she was all of those things. All of these words have been used to describe Rosa Parks, the civil rights movement icon whose decision to stay seated on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in 1955 led to a boycott and, ultimately, to a court decision finding bus segregation unconstitutional.

The rebellious life of mrs rosa parks