Book Review: Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Beacon Press, 2013. ISBN: 978-0807050477 (Hardcover). 304 pages. $27.95Americans accustomed to popular characterization of Rosa Parks as quiet, gentle seamstress who unwittingly sparked civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a Crow bus might be surprised to see her included in, much less gracing cover of, an essay collection entitled Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in 2 . Black Freedom Struggle. The cover photograph of her admiring a poster of Malcolm X might startle those used to picturing Parks in contrast to, not alongside, militants such as Malcolm X. Yet as Jeanne Theoharis, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, reveals in that volume and in The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Parks merits reconsideration as a radical for her lifetime of activism, well before and long after Montgomery bus boycott she inspired. In this political biography, Theoharis unravels what she calls of Rosa Parks by taking into full account depth, complexities, and costs of her political commitments. At same time, Theoharis analyzes how image of Parks as an accidental or angelic heroine emerged at time, consequences of that myth for Parks, and political needs that image continues to serve (42). In turn, this account of Parks's life history of being rebellious (as Parks described it) offers a different set of political lessons than fable of spontaneous act of a tired seamstress. These more sobering but more interesting lessons are important-indeed, indispensable-for activists, teachers, and students of social movements alike.The first half of The Rebellious Life charts how Parks came to action, while second half follows how she sustained and expanded her activism forty years after boycott, in Jim Crow North (xiii). The fable of Rosa Parks promotes the idea that without any preparation (political or psychic) or subsequent work a person can make change with a single act, suffer no lasting consequences, and one day be heralded as a hero (x). Theoharis counters this narrative by documenting personality, people, and political philosophy that enabled Parks to protest. Theoharis identifies respectability as bedrock of Parks's activism, not in terms of middle-class consciousness employed by many historians, but in terms of respecting oneself and insisting on respect from others (1, 33). Part of being respectable was not consenting to disrespect of her person, Theoharis explains (65). Rosa McCauley learned this rectitude and race pride from her grandfather, a supporter of Marcus Garvey and his Pan-Africanist Universal Negro Improvement Association, and her mother, a teacher in black church schools (1). Steeped in political thought from an early age, Rosa learned to identify injustice and to channel controlled anger into action with a careful balance of negotiation and militancy (4, 6). She brought this awareness to her marriage to activist Raymond Parks, whom she joined in protest against wrongful conviction of nine young men accused of rape and sentenced to death in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931-twentyfour years before her bus protest. Thereafter, Mrs. Parks conducted efforts to register black voters, and determinedly and successfully registered to vote herself in 1945, when very few managed to do so (2022). As secretary of Montgomery National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Parks investigated, publicized, and protested cases of racial violence, beginning with case of Mrs. Recy Taylor, who was gang raped by six white men in 1944 (23-24). Building on her experience in Scottsboro, Parks organized in defense of black men accused of rape, including Montgomery high school student Jeremiah Reeves who was sentenced to death for a consensual relationship with a white woman in 1953 and ultimately executed in 1958 (31). …