Rosa Parks was published by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1973 as part of the publisher’s “Crowell Biography” series for young readers. It was one of Greenfield’s earliest books and one of the first biographies of Parks written specifically for children. The book covers Parks’s life from her childhood in Tuskegee, Alabama, through the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955–1956, placing her individual act of defiance within the larger context of Jim Crow segregation and the organized resistance that preceded and followed it.
Greenfield’s achievement is to make the story comprehensible to young readers without diminishing its significance. She explains segregation clearly and honestly — what it meant in daily life, how it felt to be forced to the back of the bus, why Parks’s refusal was not a spontaneous act of tiredness but a deliberate political statement by a trained activist. She also makes clear that the boycott’s success depended on community solidarity — thousands of ordinary people walking to work for over a year — rather than on any single heroic individual.
The prose is characteristically Greenfield: simple, rhythmic, dignified. She does not talk down to her audience, and she does not soften the reality of racial violence. The book remains in print after fifty years, having introduced millions of children to the civil rights movement.
Collecting Rosa Parks
First edition (Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1973): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Later printings: $3–$10