A Q&A with Jeanne Theoharis and Gayatri Patnaik

Author photo: John Riscoli. Cover design: Louis Roe

Has it truly been ten years already? That’s how long it’s been since the second and revised edition of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Jeanne Theoharis’s definitive biography covering all six decades of the civil rights icon’s activism, was published. It’s had quite the journey along the way. Awards, adaptations, curricula, and ongoing mythbusting. Beacon Broadside editor Christian Coleman caught up with Theoharis and her editor, Gayatri Patnaik, to chat about the tenth-anniversary edition.

Christian Coleman: Congratulations on the tenth-anniversary edition! What does the book mean to you ten years on? How has your relationship to it changed or evolved over time? 

Jeanne Theoharis: This is actually the twelfth-anniversary edition of the original book, which came out in 2013. This is the tenth anniversary of the second edition. When I published the original edition, I did so without being able to see a cache of Rosa Parks’s papers that had been held for years by Guernsey’s auction following a dispute over her estate. In late 2014, Howard Buffett, horrified by a news story about how Rosa Parks’s papers and effects were being held by this auction house, instructed his foundation to act, bought them and then donated the papers and photographs to the Library of Congress. In 2015, I was able to work with the Library of Congress to examine and open those papers to the public. We published a second edition of my book with a new introduction reflecting what was in the papers. 

Many of those papers and photographs informed the young-adult edition I published with Brandy Colbert in 2021 and the documentary we did with Peacock that came out in 2022 where I served as a consulting producer. Because of the documentary, we received a grant from the Ford Foundation to create a curriculum around the film and the YA edition, and the book is now used by teachers across the country. This was also enabled by Lush Cosmetics, who created a special “Teach Truth” bath bomb in February 2022 and donated a portion of the proceeds to pay for 13,000 copies of the Parks YA edition to be distributed to teachers through the Zinn Education Project. I’m currently working with the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery on an exhibit on Parks’s longer history of activism for the museum. The work has just snowballed, and I think this new edition marks that bigger impact.

Gayatri Patnaik: It is an editor’s dream to work on a book which is genuinely original, groundbreaking, and a catalyst to fundamentally changing how we think about something—in this case, Mrs. Rosa Parks. Of course, Mrs. Parks is one of the few female historical figures in the US that everyone knows. I still recall receiving drafts of chapters of Jeanne’s book and suddenly realizing how impoverished we were as a nation in terms of truly understanding Parks—her decades-long activism, her radicalism, and her phenomenal contributions. Mrs. Parks was, as Jeanne observed, hiding in plain sight. Jeanne’s award-winning book is a powerful corrective and has already become a classic. One of the most rewarding aspects for me is to see how profoundly her book continues to influence the national conversation.

CC: For this edition’s introduction, you took an approach different from the introduction you wrote for the 2015 edition. How did you decide to write ten ways to be like Rosa Parks in the age of Black Lives Matter? 

JT: There are many problems with the fables we have of Parks and King and the civil rights movement. But one of the worst is how these myths of the civil rights movement are weaponized against young activists today—against Black Lives Matter organizers or Palestine activists—to say, “You’re not doing it the right way.” Be like King. Be more like Rosa Parks, they’re told. Many of those people chastising young activists have no idea what they’re saying because most of the things they’re unhappy with are the same critiques waged against Parks and King: You’re un-American. You’re a troublemaker. You’re unreasonable. You’re being disruptive. 

So, this new introduction was a way to challenge that framing—to say the ways to be like Rosa Parks in this moment are actually to confront the issues of our time, from police brutality to global justice, and fight widely and persistently on them, even when such activism is criticized and red-baited. It was also to underline that Rosa Parks found tremendous hope and sustenance in the spirit and militancy of young people, from her NAACP Youth Council in Montgomery to the myriad Black Power actions she supported in Detroit, delighting in the energy of young people, particularly at moments when she found her peers “complacent.”

CC: Early in the introduction, you write that the reception to The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks “was beyond [your] wildest imagination.” What are some of your favorite highlights from the ways folks have received the biography? 

JT: One of my favorite moments came the first week. I was on Melissa Harris-Perry and then on PBS News Hour with Gwen Ifill. Both of them, in their excitement about the book and learning about Mrs. Parks’s larger history of freedom fighting, said a version of “Thank you for bringing her back to us.” That even though we all had heard of Rosa Parks, she was so much better than what we’d been given. I’ve heard from so many activists and community organizers across the country how her story has brought them faith and sustenance for their own struggle. I have been told by so many professors and teachers how much students gravitate to this history and their anger at being taught so many myths about her. My most viral tweet has been around Rosa Parks’s clear opposition to Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court—even before the Anita Hill story came out—particularly because it brings Rosa Parks squarely into our current moment.

CC: Since its original publication, Rebellious Life won the NAACP Image Award and others. As you mentioned, it’s been adapted for young-adult readers and as a Peabody Award-winning documentary produced by NBC-Peacock. Did you see the book having this kind of life when you first wrote it? What course did you have in mind for it? 

JT: Of course, this is what any author hopes for—the dream of changing the ways this country honors Rosa Parks and how people teach about her in school. But to get to start to do it . . . Wow! 

When we first brought the book out and people started asking me to do a YA adaptation, I was resistant. Mrs. Parks had been trapped for decades in all these bad children’s and YA books. My job, as I saw it, was to do a full, footnoted biography for adults. But, over the years of doing a lot of talks for teachers, I remember at one workshop in Montgomery in the summer of 2018 that someone, again, asked me what I recommended to teach on her. Finally, I was like, I need to have skin in the game. I can imagine how to do a version for teenagers. So, we did the YA. And then Lush and Zinn Education Project partnered to get it in the hands of thousands of teachers.

Meanwhile, over the years, on holidays and important days, I have always done Twitter threads as a way to circulate material on Parks that most people don’t know. I did one on her birthday in 2019, and a documentary filmmaker I had met, Johanna Hamilton, reached out, surprised by all she didn’t know and asked if someone was doing a documentary. She was stunned that there hadn’t been one on her. She partnered with fellow filmmaker Yoruba Richen. Soledad O’Brien came on board. They sold the project to Peacock. The film premiered at Tribeca in June of 2022. Meanwhile, the Ford Foundation gave us a grant to build education and outreach around the film, and with Zinn Education Project, we made a curriculum using the YA version and film. Now, thousands of teachers are bringing this into their classrooms, despite the pushback against teaching Black history that has escalated across the country.

So many people have helped elevate this book and this history of Rosa Parks’s life of freedom fighting. It has been an honor of a lifetime.

CC: You have a new book about Martin Luther King’s campaign for racial justice outside the South coming out from The New Press, King of the North. How do you see it in conversation with Rebellious Life? As an extension of it? 

JT: Certainly, King of the North is an extension of, is in conversation with, and stands on the shoulders of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. I learned a lot from doing the research for the Parks book and seeing its reception in the world. First, with Parks and now with King, the need to return to the people we think we know and realize how much we don’t. Both with Parks and with King, there were so many aspects of their activism that were hidden in plain sight. We got comfortable with certain stories. And then looking with new eyes and new questions, a whole realm of activism comes into view (in part because of the work of the Black press that documented all the things that both were doing and that, in King's case, have been missed by so many biographers).

I realized in all my public speaking about Rosa Parks both how hungry people are for this fuller history and also for understanding why we get the fables we get and what political work they do. So, for King of the North, I’ve gone back and examined how certain narratives about King and his work were key media narratives built at the time to serve Northern liberals and US Cold War politics, unpacked them and shown how Dr. King himself took them on. I’ve also centered Coretta Scott King in this book, understanding that he became what he did because of her.

People often ask me what my most interesting find was doing the Parks research. It wasn’t one particular thing. It was that she spent more than half of her life living in Detroit, fighting the racism of the Jim Crow North, “the Northern promised land that wasn’t.” Similarly with King, we’ve Southernized him. From graduate school on, King understood and challenged Northern segregation and the limits of Northern liberalism at home (a “new Egypt,” King would proclaim). And finally, like with Parks, getting to spend many years with Martin and Coretta Scott King, to see the measure of their work and their courage, has been like getting to know them anew. A King for our times.

About the Authors 

Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of City University of New York and the author or coauthor of numerous books and articles on the civil rights and Black Power movements and the contemporary politics of race in the US. Her books include The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (winner of a 2014 NAACP Image Award) and A More Beautiful and Terrible History (winner of the 2018 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction). Her forthcoming book, King of the North: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South, will be published March 25, 2025. Connect with her on Twitter (@JeanneTheoharis) and on Bluesky (@jeannetheoharis.bsky.social). 

Gayatri Patnaik is the director of Beacon Press. Previously an editor at both Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge, she has been at Beacon Press over twenty years and has published authors including Imani Perry, Cornel West, Kate Bornstein, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Jeanne Theoharis. She acquires in US History, with a focus on African American History and race/ethnicity/immigration, and began Beacon’s award-winning “ReVisioning History” series. Gayatri occasionally signs memoir, began Beacon’s LGBTQ series, “Queer Action/Queer Ideas,” (edited with Michael Bronski) and developed books in “The King Legacy,” with Joanna Green, in a series about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Follow her on Twitter at @gpatnaik1. and on Bluesky at @gayatripat.bsky.social.

Christian Coleman is the digital marketing manager at Beacon Press and editor of Beacon Broadside. Before joining Beacon, he worked in writing, copy editing, and marketing positions at Sustainable Silicon Valley and Trikone. He graduated from Boston College and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Follow him on Twitter at @coleman_II and on Bluesky at @colemanthe2nd.bsky.social.