By Nikki Giovanni
The day Rosa Parks stayed in her seat, and how one tired woman's quiet no set a whole city walking.
It's an ordinary December evening in 1955. Rosa Parks, a seamstress heading home from work, takes her seat on the Montgomery bus. When the driver tells her to give it up to a white man, she simply, calmly, doesn't. She's arrested for it. And the women of Montgomery decide they've had enough, so the whole Black community stops riding the buses, for over a year, walking to work in the heat and the cold until the highest court in the land says the segregation on those buses was wrong. Nikki Giovanni, a poet, tells it with real fire, and Bryan Collier's Caldecott Honor collages fill with light.
It clears up the myth most children arrive with, that Rosa Parks refused to move because her feet hurt, and shows a thoughtful woman making a deliberate choice, backed by a whole organized community. Because Giovanni is a poet, the language is richer than the usual biography, which suits an older reader in the unit. And it makes the boycott concrete, a year of walking, so a class feels that change came from thousands of ordinary people staying the course, not one dramatic day.