The Year They Walked

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Unlike the more comprehensive Rosa Parks: My Story (Children's Forecasts, Nov. 29), Siegel's considerably shorter book focuses on the immediate repercussions of Parks's refusal in 1955 to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala. The author tells how Parks's arrest galvanized the black community and sparked a citywide bus boycott that lasted for more than a year, until the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled the Alabama laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional. Siegel's narrative includes numerous quotes by Parks, as well as excerpts from speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. Though lacking the passion of Parks's own story and marred by occasionally awkward writing (``Along the hard road some events gave her courage and pushed her along''), this account effectively documents the overwhelming humiliation experienced by Montgomery's black residents during a year filled with shocking incidents of racism. Ages 9-12. (Feb.)

School Library Journal

Gr 4-7-- A partial biography of Rosa Parks and her role in the boycott. Her childhood and efforts to obtain a formal education are described in a smoothly written third-person narrative void of conversational structures. Siegel combines descriptions of Parks's life and work with the growth of the civil rights efforts in the deep South; she also explains how the black community organized itself to assert its constitutional rights and gained international attention. It is also the story of the rise of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference presented in language and format appropriate to its audience. The good quality black-and-white photographs intermittently interspersed throughout the text are informative and affecting. The primary distinction between this title and Rosa Parks (Dial, 1992) is in tone. To read her autobiography is to experience the events personally, because Parks seems to tell her story directly to each reader. The two books are complementary, although very much alike in information and scope.-- Helen E. Williams, formerly at University of Maryland, College Park