*Apologies- audio quality improves after 2 min mark*
Until recently, Rosa Park’s personal papers were unavailable to the public. In this compelling new book from the Library of Congress, where the Parks Collection is housed, the civil rights icon is revealed for the first time in print through her private manuscripts and handwritten notes. Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words illumines her inner thoughts, her ongoing struggles, and how she came to be the person who stood up by sitting down. At the height of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as Parks was both pilloried and celebrated, she found a catharsis in her writing. Her precise descriptions of her arrest, the segregated South, and her recollections of childhood resistance to white supremacy document a lifetime of battling inequality. This event is free and open to the public at 101 Auburn Avenue NE, Atlanta, GA 30303.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
SUSAN REYBURN is a senior writer-editor in the Library of Congress Publishing Office. She is the author of Football Nation: Four Hundred Years of America's Game; Women Who Dare: Amelia Earhart; and Gardens and Landscapes of the National Trust for Historic Preservation; and she is a coauthor of Baseball Americana: Treasures from the Library of Congress; The Library of Congress World War II Companion; and The Civil War Desk Reference. She has also written for a wide variety of LOC publications on classic American film, theater, art, and architecture, and numerous works for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
ABOUT STEPHANE DUNN:
Stephane Dunn is an professor and academic program director of the Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies program (CTEMS). She received her MA, MFA, and PhD from the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in film, creative writing, and African American and American cultural and literary studies. She authored the 2008 book, Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois Press), which explores the representation of race, gender, and sexuality as they play out in the Black Power and feminist influenced explosion of black action films in the early 1970s, including, Sweetback Sweetback's Baad Assssss Song, Cleopatra Jones, and Foxy Brown. Her writings about film and black popular culture and history have appeared in several edited books, Ms.magazine, Screening Noir, The Chronicle of Higher Education, TheRoot.com, AJC, CNN.com, and the Best African American Essays (2009) among others.
Recorded on February 27, 2020
