The way we learn history shapes how we think about the present and the future. Consider what most Americans know about Rosa Parks, who died last October at age ninety-two.

In the popular legend, Parks is portrayed as a tired old seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, who, on the spur of the moment after a hard day at work, decided to resist the city’s segregation law by refusing to move to the back of the bus on December 1, 1955. She is typically revered as a selfless individual who, with one spontaneous act of courage, triggered the bus boycott and became, as she is often called, “the mother of the civil rights movement.”

Although a number of books—including Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters, Stewart Burns’s Daybreak of Freedom, and Parks’s autobiography, My Story—provide a complete chronicle, most of the obituaries for Parks lacked historical context and trivialized the efforts that it took to destroy Jim Crow.

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