Great intro to Rosa Parks | Rosa

Rosa | Rosa | Nikki Giovanni

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	• Rosa Nikki Giovanni Square Fish, 2007 - 40 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Rosa

The book "Rosa" by Nikki Giovanni, takes the reader though the day of December 1, 1955 with Mrs. Rosa Parks. There are details about her family and job up until the moment where Mrs. Parks decided to not give up her seat on the bus for a white person. She was taken to jail. Friends and the many of the community members rallied after Rosa's stand on the bus. Soon the colored citizens of Montgomery were boycotting the bus. They walked everywhere they had to go until November 13, 1956 when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on the bus was not fair.

The story of Rosa Parks was one of my absolute favorites to study as a student; and now as a teacher in training I would really like to find a book that best illustrates her message. The illustration with in "Rosa" are beautiful but the wording of the text could be better. Rosa Parks story is a very important one for children to learn and it is also important that they have all the facts of this non-violent protest. This book does give the general facts of the events that happen that December 1 and the events that followed. I would have liked to see more about Rosa and how she was involved in the protest after her arrest. It seems that once she is arrested she just disappears from the story.

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Great intro to Rosa Parks

Beautiful illustrations accompany this simplified story of Rosa Park and the movement she inspired. The writing is very personal, though I was slightly annoyed at how the point of view jumped around instead of staying concise. Still, it's gorgeous, inspirational prose that gives off a lot of passion, and I was able to read it to my class. The illustrations are still the best part.

Rosa

I would recommend this book mainly for children in 3rd through 5th grade. My favorite thing about this book is how the writing and the illustrations work together to make you feel the emotions of this historic moment. Giovanni uses dialogue between Rosa and her fellow seamstresses to show us her sense of humor, when she tells them at Christmas, "those elves in the North Pole have nothing on us!" She reflects the disrespect for African Americans at the time when a police officer asks Rosa," Auntie are you going to move?". Collier's illustrations capture the emotions felt in such a powerful way. For example, instead of focusing on a whole scene he captures a small, but profound piece, such as Rosa's hands clutching and clenching around her purse straps in her lap. Collier also gives reader's the feeling of the massive size of the civil rights movement with a foldout scene of marchers in the last pages of the book. My only criticism of this book is that it doesn't not give a kind of wrap up of what happened to Rosa in the end, but this would be a great way to spark a child's curiosity and encourage them to find out more about this amazing woman.

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Great book-Poor binding

It is a well-written book with great illustration. However, the second time I picked it up to read to my granddaughter, the inside pages fell away from the cover.

A Rosa By Any Other Name

Sometimes I think the nicest thing about Nikki Giovanni is she lets a good story unwind before you all by itself. And then I have to remember that's the craft, it appears so effortless in her hands. This book that I just got in a school book sale, for very little, is certainly a pearl without price, a deal here for anyone wanting to gift a classroom, school, library, teacher, child.

This is the story of Rosa Parks on one day as it should be told, as it unfolds with the language of that day, with the details and immediacy of seeming so right, of a realness that might include macaroni and cheese and hearing of Rosa's arrest at a Piggly Wiggly.

I love to ride buses. I rode them the first 28 years of my life exclusively. But nothing matches the heat of one of them in the true southern summers, and the need for them there. Oh that is another story to share of poverty and hard work, lives of hard work and hours of labors. When I rode as a young girl with my grandmother in Florida it was sweltering, noisy, lurching and an experience hard to think of how to place into a book. Yet this one seemed to sweep up that exhaust and fume along with the separation, the sections for the folks, the inherent separations of the south and seat it onto the bench just there, next to Rosa Parks as this seamstress going home. A Rosa Parks that was unassumingly good, who met and faced the barbarity of separate but unequal by refusing to be satisfied as less. No, on this day she did not stand and defer to a clod of a driver and a bus full of resentment and outright hostility that asked her to get up for a white patron. Rosa Parks asked then to be treated the way others expected to be, and she then we know so well, she was arrested. The simple act became a call to grace.

I think if you want to teach this story, and everyone should teach this story with children, this is the writer and this is the book to start the journey onto a way of our meeting to face fate. Onto a bus with questions posed to the audience of our humanity. Are we able to allow our shadow, our bigotry, our lie to be cast away and give to another what we might want for our own? Are we able to rise from this bus, this symbol of movement, shared ride as travelers, this place of communion upon a road of justice, can we meet here in Mrs. Parks and find a collective way of traveling together as brother, over the horror of some approximation of as master and slave? Can we within this moment carry it forward in times arrow into the collective consciousness to rise and lift a people forward from here on our seat?

This is what Giovanni encapsulates within her work and Collier illustrates to take to our children, the questions we hold out for them though our times to consider and collectively address.

The book is inspired, it is accurate, it is driven to you on a dream of southern telling, so that you can, through the re-telling, shape the possibility that this becomes the least we can do, to sit together in mutual respect and consideration willing to allow someone as fine as Mrs. Parks a nice seat after a long day of hard work as she thinks of the meatloaf she will be making for her family and the mother that has been ill she is caring for, who frames for us her humanity on a day all the world will be listening and watching her face and she will stare directly with her will at the national charter and what it must require of us in the doing.

And we hear Giovanni in the re-telling. Asking us again to ask these questions that must be asked and answered by every person. Who are we on this bus? By what will we be known?

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Fifty years after her refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus, Mrs. Rosa Parks is still one of the most important figures in the American civil rights movement. This tribute to Mrs. Parks is a celebration of her courageous action and the events that followed. Award-winning poet, writer, and activist Nikki Giovanni?s evocative text combines with Bryan Collier?s striking cut-paper images to retell the story of this historic event from a wholly unique and original perspective.

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